Their book weighs three and one-half kilos and shows through genetic maps of the world’s populations how humanity, for all its spreads and migrations, is biologically one. Climate and culture, history and language, have created different adaptations, ends, appearances, but speaking of us as a species, there are no such things as biologically separate races. The book took fourteen years. Most of Clare’s childhood summers were conditioned by Paolo’s making maps. She and I were usually alone on our journeys back to the States.
The plaque supports a thick medal, made of an unknown alloy, and it holds a flame. The medal is screwed into the plastic wood, and the citation, printed in gold letters on a thin plastic panel, is glued to the bottom half.
No important Italian prize would ever look so unsophisticated, institutional, and of so little material value. The chunky plaque, unexpected and unmanipulated by deals, has a pleasing integrity. It holds up excellence as something objective and possibly free. As it hangs on the wall, the immense normality of opportunity stands out. Paolo’s work exists in a sphere that is the world and bigger than self. The competition had not been rigged.
I decide to tell my mother. I ring her at five o’clock in the morning her time, using a system I have grown to love. Three rings and then I hang up. It works across an ocean, connecting simultaneously early dawn to midday, but, more to the point, me to her. It pierces a silence and gives me a strong feeling of gratitude that my mother, at seventy-nine, is still alive. She is sleeping somewhere I can easily reach.
Besides the fact that phoning from America costs three times less than phoning from Italy, I love the simple complicity in our game. Mother’s answer to my signal opens a new way in to her. Her readiness to answer me is not true to life. It is a fantasy any child unjustly holds for a mother. For the seconds it lasts, before the words start and we become adults, I know how buried but persistent that expectation is. Virginia Woolf was perhaps the first woman in English to articulate the link between her sense of self and her mother, the scramble for her attention among her seven siblings, and the effect her mother’s death had on a thirteen-year-old who “could not master it, envisage it, deal with it.” The phrase “deal with it” surprised me. I thought it came into use far later.
Instead of waiting for the rings, this time Mother picks up the receiver. Her voice, which in the day consciously lilts cheerfully, croaks at this early hour. Anguish soars. A dear friend has been shot and killed. The little woman (why do I assume she was little?) was held up at gunpoint in downtown Milwaukee and shot for her worn-out purse. As she hit her head on the sidewalk, the brief nightmare ended.
My mother operates under a strong impulse to banish “negative thought.” She has always possessed physical courage and is psychologically brave, unwilling to give in to fear. She drives at night and feels that she is protected. “What is happening to this country?” she asks me.
The silence between us has no static filling in. The line is perfect. There is nothing to say. She and I hold America between us on two receivers. My story waits. We leave country behind and get down to the tragic fact.
A student of Paolo’s has come back from Mississippi. He, too, talked about guns. Guns in closets, assault weapons, kids going to parties carrying them in their inside vest pockets. Over dinner at our home in Parma he had expressed his perplexity. “Guns are something terrible and frightening. No one but the Mafia would consider carrying guns here.”
Paolo picked up, insisting that wasn’t quite true. Everyone remembered how there were arsenals of guns in mountain hideouts around Reggio Emilia even fifteen years after the war. Togliatti, then the head of the Communist Party, finally sent men from the central committee to collect many of them. Less than ten years ago, a group called Gladio, a right-wing Masonic organization, was discovered to be in possession of arms and deposits of larger weapons, hidden in caves and buried underground. The group was rumored to be connected in some way to NATO and CIA funding. The members, mostly men fifty and above, were supposedly ready for armed revolt. “But you’re correct,” Paolo said, “the myth and the history of the use of guns are different.” “Right,” said the student, “you can’t buy them on sale in Parma, choose one out of a pile, like a toy. More important, no decent person believes it’s his right.”
A year ago. Even a month ago. Italy is changing and nothing can mend it or describe the reality of these stressful feelings. Time traces an undoing which leaves us, like our own middle age, on an incline. Yet we cherish these new illusions. Far more than all the heaviness, we feel jittery, giddy, and finally hopeful. Clare feels that the political changes are interesting. For the first time she burrows through the newspaper, calling out her disgust at most of the politicians. She starts looking at judiciary systems comparatively. She is trying to define her part. The changes in the Italian constitution will break open a continuity and crack a mirror. The practical problem will be to shift from a parliamentary system, in which the parliament is directly elected. There the executive branch, consisting of a Prime Minister and a cabinet that he or she appoints, acts as an expression of that parliament. It then produces a program for parliament to work on and approve. Now the choice is moving toward a presidential system—like either the French or the American one. As the myths shatter, as the new laws come in, we must find a way to improve this all too corruptible political class.
Writing a new constitution is complex at every level, including a psychological one. Italy’s constitution is one of the most advanced in the world. Certainly, in America, after two hundred years, there would be issues that would be drafted differently. But opening the sacred premises and fussing with their absolute fundamentals always runs the danger of disturbing an equilibrium which then cannot be reestablished. Like Humpty-Dumpty, something that worked, once broken into pieces, cannot be psychologically put back together. And if the work of writing the constitution is not done with the highest, most disinterested concerns, laws can be written which then slowly can be put into practice in antidemocratic ways.
Political, economic, and perhaps personal change will rush through this staggering revision in Italy. It must come. What appears difficult is to convince people how we are part of it, person after person. If it comes, it may take another generation or two to understand what it really means. The challenge to present authority, however, will in some way be embodied and enacted now as we exit from the limbo between one republic and the next. The day will arrive when we’ll finally vote on an outcome. Although that date comes and goes, even as a threat, it’s not yet a reality. The center is still looking for a leader.
Last night Paolo had an altercation with the rector. A year ago, Paolo would never have lifted his voice to a man who represented the entire university. He would have formally granted him superior qualities and knowledge. Paolo would not have insisted on their great differences.
Confronted with the rector’s conveniently closed mind, Paolo, instead, admitted to himself and expressed out loud his own greater experience and commitment. This seems so simple and yet it is very new. Loyalty, hierarchy, political parties have nearly a religious meaning here. Loyalty plays a key role in deciding what is right and wrong, whether one belongs to the left, right, or center.
In I Promessi Sposi, the novel taught to all Italian high school students from north to south, east to west, the author, Alessandro Manzoni, replays history in fiction. In his tableau of society, written during the nineteenth-century Risorgimento under Austrian censors, Manzoni aspires to replicate life in seventeenth-century Lombardy. Written in 1826–28 and then reworked over a lifetime, above all to establish a standard for the Italian language by recasting the novel in Florentine Italian, the book creates an interpretation of history that roughly equates with human nature. The narrator works hard on the truth of his vast rendering, and there is no model of modern democracy in it. In many ways the largest social change occurs through the religious conversion of the Unnamed. Through this character, too, the idea is conveyed that the rulers
or governors confer liberty on the people and not that the people grant it to a state. Liberty is historically a distant dream, given that the American and French Revolutions have not yet taken place within the book’s time frame. Yet the effects of the French Revolution surely were vivid precautions to Manzoni.
Although we are often reminded by the narrator that what we are reading is art, he emphasizes the authority of his historical facts. It is a cramping authority, a marblelike inscription of facts and documents directing us toward the book’s authenticity.
Manzoni’s novel was a triumph about liberty at the time. It takes up the republican theme of independence from foreign rule. Without a doubt it aspires to politics as well as art. That ambiguity, that inappropriateness and impossibility of fusing reality and art over such a long sweep, is one of the burdens and limits of its construction. Studied as a high form of art, the political implications are conditioned fictions. Italy was not yet a country and the Austrians were governing Milan. That is one reason he situated the novel in an earlier era. The presence of censors and the fact that Manzoni looked back instead of forward is perhaps why he fixes impossible limits in his vision of liberty. His Catholicism is the ultimate definition of freedom.
Authority is delineated in state and church definitions, and the institutions are then subjected in part to the fates of the people occupying positions of power. Rising above the endless limits and terrors of governance is the terror of nature as seen in the effects of a plague. Characters are shown from the beginning to have limited freedom and rare moments of correspondence between feeling and action. Characters incapable of change are forgiven by religious means. The omniscient narrator is a kind of dictator, inexhaustibly covering all spaces, insisting on his view of the world.
To me, Manzoni reveals great blind spots in his relationship to his characters and their psychological possibilities. His focus is on history rather than on his characters. His focus suggests that injustice is endemic. Lucia and Renzo and Don Abbondio are static in a psychological and social sense. Fallibilities are natural, unavoidable, and ultimately power generally operates on its own immoral paths. The eternal rightness of his view of history has a subliminal effect on the whole book. Even in their greatest moments, the characters are cast against a tableau that will be forever deeply unjust and favoring power, because of human nature.
Manzoni sculpts many unforgettable scenes on a reader’s mind, but his resort to a confining definition of morality and action, as well as his insistence on cyclical repetitions of evil and cataclysm, suffocates the freedom of his characters. Unlike Dante, who puts the world he sees to the test, and finds a blinding order in the universe and its reflections in self, so his focus remains poetic, Manzoni, aspiring to a position of authority, tells a story about the sadness of society. He conveys a sense that his characters are never free to be anything other than what they are. I Promessi Sposi is a constitution binding Italian students and teachers. In the schools, Manzoni still cannot be touched. In its sacredness, his work is held like a citizen above the law.
Given that all Italians attending any form of high school approach the novel as one of their principal texts, its words, by now, have in some unmeasurable way led Italy where it is today. The book is taught and studied and analyzed, but students are not allowed to criticize it, to come in with what might amount to commonsense observations and objections to its premises. It needs to be touched in that way. The teaching reinforces what his characters have implied: the sense that we, too, as readers are helpless to react as we might believe.
Manzoni wrote under censorship. Admissions and conclusions should be drawn in new directions. His fictions were political and ideological. His art was loaded with an interpretation of history as well as an ardent revision of its language.
Comparisons to modern books should be freely allowed. Manzoni’s heavy seriousness should be taken as the work of a frail human being. The individual student, a private person, should be encouraged to explore whether Manzoni’s book has parallels, not in art, but in the present day. It is precisely this impossibility of changing contexts, even as an imaginative exercise, that makes the historical novel so deadly.
Death is a mediator in I Promessi Sposi. It is heavily Christian. Through Manzoni’s sorely tried Catholic lens, forgiveness, futility, knowing in an absolute sense what things mean cancel other approaches, until in politics and history the secular world has no ground, no authority, especially as institutions. When Verdi writes his Requiem to commemorate Manzoni, it is an interesting moment of two forms of art and two very different artists coming together in a consecration of the long political struggle the country has been through. So much art is impregnated with political meanings that were part of Italy’s nationalistic struggle and which should be taken apart with obvious common sense. Studies need to be fast-forwarded to examine the fifty years when Italian democracy was set in motion.
The fact that the Catholic Church has grown up on this peninsula embraces a phenomenon so large and long and unquantifiable that anything I say will not even graze the reality. I have no words that can brush against its angels, its saints, its culture, its political battles, its Eucharist, its long night of holding faith open in the world. Having the origin of the Catholic Church in Italy is like having the sun here. In other places, the sun has a different power and influence. Everything in Italy, being so long and directly inside its roaring heat and power, holds some of its radioactive charge. Every blade of grass, every pair of hands, every mind, has been touched by its politics and its religion. Having the sun here has burned certain other possibilities out.
There are very few great Italian novels. The most obvious reason for this is that characters are so severely confined and conditioned by society that they have no room to develop. Italian novels are more about society and politics and their effects than about individuals. Individuals simply don’t develop and grow along the liberal lines of character, choices, change brought about through each character’s subtle features and free moves. Perhaps if teachers would encourage nothing more than talking honestly and telling the truth about the characters in I Promessi Sposi, reading the entire book for its ideological assumptions, history as it is portrayed might change. Secular, modern reality, which is not often articulated as real in proximity to sacred works, should be allowed to add context and perspective to the study of this piece of literature. Forgiveness is a deceptive and not always useful frame for establishing how characters operate and evolve.
In that same spirit, Paolo is only looking for a little pragmatic improvement. Turning against the group and what passes for custom, he pushed on. “I asked the rector, ‘What kind of university locks its classrooms at seven o’clock and keeps them locked on weekends? We’re scientists, not car salesmen.’ I lost my temper. ‘How are students ever to learn that studying is a passion, not a job? They’ll never do any important work nine to five. We have to lift our standards to a European level.’ ” The rector was silent and then he gave in.
The stakes are higher than we know. Ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has announced that he will resist the divestment of his three television channels. Having power but little feel for democratic institutions, he has the arrogance that we see in a character like Don Rodrigo in I Promessi Sposi. Apparently assuming that he is safely exempt from the law, his TV stations present government news as if the people can be easily duped. A public referendum, in direct contradiction to the magistrates’ decision that Berlusconi’s holdings must be divested, has granted that a private person can possess more than one station. On Berlusconi’s channels, as the pope is still apt to do before elections, his employees tell people how to vote. Berlusconi doesn’t really trust people. He sees Italians as far less sophisticated than they are.
Parking my bike against a wall last week, I heard a woman with a baby buggy saying to a man holding a briefcase, “Time passes.” “No,” he said, “time flies.” They expressed two different points of view on time, perhaps because of t
heir respective tasks. There are many more. Huge cast-iron bells in Parma’s fifty Catholic churches ring the hours, the quarter hours, the half hours, the hour for evening prayers. Last night one tolled thirty-nine times as I walked toward home. Time is upon us. It is vibrating with a frightening purity.
I feel more than ever that I must live my own definition. The day interests me. I seize the multiplicity of a sky full of clouds, layered one on top of the other. The sunrise rimmed each and every cirrus strip this morning, about seven-thirty, when I took my walk. The morning star was still a bright point traveling toward us. The moon was new. The sun got framed between two clouds, becoming a fiery eye. Be, be, be is what I breathe to myself.
The clouds were loaded with gray and were somehow thrilling. They moved fast. In politics we work from positions of supposed rationality and power. Instead, this other is movement in darkness, a listening and watching for signs that say nothing, except you can lean into the dark, listen and move and be still. All night, off and on, I dreamed of a black infant, sucking at my breast, demanding attention. In some basic way it was announcing something new being born. The black infant is part of my own life; I’m conscious of it. I don’t know how to take care of it, how to shelter it from the difficulties it may entail.
Verdi’s father wrote: “[Your mother] also brought your bed to Sant’Agata, so that if you come, you will—I hope—want to live with us and enjoy it in the midst of your beautiful possessions”
Mother Tongue Page 18