Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  [15]

  SYSTEMS

  I feel angry that I can’t be of more help to Clare. The dissatisfactions and imbalances of being nineteen are real and important. She’s not happy at all with the university, where she is working toward a degree in sociological and demographic statistics. Who chose it? Apparently another part of herself did. She is doing the work well but, more worrisome, cannot connect with its feel. “The work is all in my head. It doesn’t,” she says, “make me grow.” That may be true; I hate to think so. Yet Paolo and I both see how this tool could be of use in any future subject she puts her mind to. And there’s her age. In a second, her life can change.

  Pattern is a fascinating quality in life: framing, filling, linking. In the counting, in planning for the billions of people in the world, numbers will speak and arrange and hint at how decisions must be made. Numbers will give back some features in history that cling to all lives, waiting to be taken from masses of records of any sort. Familiarity with numbers will give her a way into another language. In the future we will turn to people who know how to read and connect interpretations back and forth. They will translate parts of the world. She’s trying to personalize her research: she’s looking comparatively at women’s education in twenty-five countries.

  I am in awe of her and remember the way my father told me that no woman should bother her head with numbers. He laughed when I couldn’t get geometry and encouraged me to give it up. “Women don’t need numbers.” I was glad at the time, and that lightness reveals how mindlessly women’s paths were truncated, their lives redirected.

  I contrast it with Paolo taking on Clare in the eighth grade when the Pythagorean theorem wouldn’t enter her head. I see him shouting and pounding the table, insisting that girls can do math. “Geometry is only a matter of practice.” They sweated together and lived each test she took like a coach and a player before a game. I was against the pressure and the technique. He’d come home early and seriously roll up his sleeves. His knowledge and caring were what she was after. It was full immersion from a fully caring father. Once Clare had climbed through that rocky patch, she became a player on her own.

  In my house when I was growing up, there weren’t these bloody scenes. There was no resolution either. My father scoffed at science. Numbers were something businessmen needed. My mother did not even have her name on their checking account when my father died. I wish I’d known about Madame Curie then. I wish I’d known that even Virginia Woolf’s mother did the family finances. Without a scuffle or a raised voice, we would slip off to our rooms and rage to ourselves. And the world remained basically U.S. government and politics.

  Still, Clare’s conviction must grow from the inside. Something about her capacity to understand numbers arises from her sense of an identity with parts. Only she will know if it’s really her field.

  It was not her first choice. She graduated with a maturità in Italian, English, physics, and math, with perfect marks. She can also paint, sing, and bake cakes that are round and sweet. Her perfectionist stance is a position between her profound, flexible intelligence and her need to prove herself in others’ eyes. Her first choice of a university faculty went all wrong. It was a shock, meeting the world and finding it absolutely unyielding.

  Admissions tests or criteria for admission have not been a part of universities in Italy. Since 1968, the idea had been to let anyone try, although there were never sufficient classrooms. (Rome, for example, divides the students in some years into groups that attend four months for each academic year.) On the whole there is no lab experience, no individual classwork, and few libraries. (Most are private caches of books kept in cupboards with large iron keys in the locks.) The system did, in a literal and utopian sense, offer anyone a chance at a university education. It was virtually free. The superb students inhaled textbooks (often badly translated from English) and learned how to be independent in studying. But they were rarely engaged in dialogue, in open exchange, in discussion of questions.

  The system, which has had little capacity to self-correct, has been unable to deliver what it hoped. One simple fact is that until two years ago universities did not work on budgets. They simply spent and sent all the bills to Rome. That unreal decade is over.

  In the past few years, some faculties have adopted tests to limit admissions. Like any test, they need a context, a rationale, a supporting structure. None of these has been put in place. Hotly contested as undemocratic, the admission tests last an hour, or half an hour, and vary from faculty to faculty, city to city. Since the introduction of the tests, someone in Parma told me that the selection process has never been more manipulated than at this present moment. Because places are limited, advance copies of the test and some private arrangements are common with parents of students who insist on their child’s being admitted. This taint is endemic, undermining a sense of order in all public competitions. (Manzoni describes the effects beautifully.) Of course, not all enter in this corrupt but accepted way. Many actually pass the tests.

  For whatever reason, Clare, in taking three brief, very different admissions tests in architecture in three cities, did not score in the top group anywhere. She endured shock and shattering. Her chances closed. These changes, too, make up part of the new climate. In a matter of weeks situations change from all to nothing. The tests are defined as “American.”

  People told us it was our fault. We should have known that the tests were manipulated. We should have made sure that someone was looking out for her paper. We were “stupid” and made her pay the price.

  These are difficult moments and difficult to explain. How could we undermine Clare by using influence? What kind of message would we be giving if she cannot believe that she can make her own way? It’s amazing that she didn’t pass. However, that still did not allow us to stress (because we didn’t have the facts in hand) that it was the system’s fault. It is disorganized, chaotic, but we must not assume (because it is not true) absolute corruption. It was a terrible experience and a humiliating one, yet it refocused her, and in the setback it suggested that she might want or need to look elsewhere. In order not to lose the year, she started in statistics. Brave, she started asking questions.

  Clare is looking for a physicality in her identity. The whole of the U.S. women’s movement has suggested that women need to inhabit their bodies and to start from that actual place when using language and creating literature. In the invisible and unwritten and unidentified spheres of their own makeup lie dark and compelling authenticities. Inhabiting language that starts from feelings and what you know in your bones is ultimately much more difficult than any book on statistics.

  In Clare’s spare time around the house, she has learned to make chocolate. Its rich smell drives us crazy. She has set up an easel in her bedroom and has begun to paint. The most recent canvas included cloth wrinkled into landscape and slips of paper worked into new ideas about borders. She has joined a rowing club and admires her blisters’ white bubbles. She looks for ways to put herself into her work.

  Italian universities are not set up for clubs and activities. Affiliations and alumnae groups are not part of these student years. Probably because more than 90 percent of the students live at home, identification with the institution extends only so far.

  Universities in Italy are ill prepared to give individual attention. Professors have little or no accountability for how they teach or the quality of the students they produce. Good teaching is a matter of conscience and good luck. The sheer physical numbers make it easy to justify the impossibility of written work and private interaction. Many students work hard and are rarely given the suggestions and corrections that would turn their work into something outstanding. It is still a rather common practice for the professors in science, when dealing with the final thesis, to write large portions of it for the student, rather than be embarrassed by or blamed for his or her lacunae. The model of education is still one of redemption from disorder, often by means of appearances.


  Clare knows that statistics is dry and not physical in the least. It is miles and miles of the mind’s abstractions. Yet she might well enjoy some of the notions in Boolean space. Or she might not.

  For the first time, Clare seems vaguely aware that she has a life of her own. This feeling is frightening and frustrating. Studying statistics seems a cruel joke to her, if she puts it next to her idea of becoming a diplomat or someone who helps people in the Third World. What about history? What about dropping out? What about music? Architecture somewhere else? She is not quite ready to face the fact that she could live different choices, by connecting to her deepest feelings, by taking decisions and risks.

  Making choices has not been an ideal for those who live in Italy. It is not generally part of the culture. One’s roots are both place and family. You are encouraged to trim your dreams and modify them and tell yourself they aren’t possible anyway. Or to live them like Phaetons who can’t truly burn themselves up by driving the sun’s chariot across the sky. Family will buffer and intervene, catch and straighten out, and the horses will never break loose.

  In the last century, Verdi’s father wrote to his son, who was enjoying success in France: “[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, bed, and his beautiful possessions were not enough for Verdi. He rose up and viscerally challenged these things. Yet they are, for an average person, strong, universally compensatory notes, when it comes to convincing people to stay in the Po plain. Why risk the world? Why look far afield for different values? It is frightening to think you could do anything you want. The high seas mock: How will you get across?

  Many of the mountain villages above Parma nearly emptied out before and after the two world wars because of harsh prevailing economic conditions. Groups left together for England, Scotland, Argentina, and America. In spite of the difficulties, most found opportunities. On our Sunday outings to little refurbished villages like Grondola, above Pontremoli, we are surprised at how much English is spoken. Immigrants, after their retirement or merely for summer vacations, do up the impoverished stone houses they left behind and now use them for pleasure. Parma, being a much larger and more prosperous hub, was able to keep people in place even through times of great hardship. But stability has its costs.

  When one grows up in Parma, the matrix of known and unknown is quite fixed. Historical memory, folk wisdom, religious resignation, and a lack of consequences for one’s actions seep into people. Omnipresent is a sensation that extends to society in patterns that begin with the family. It is nearly a crime to rupture continuities. Down at the bottom of relationships and actions is the message: Don’t change, don’t break away. And perhaps under that is the message: Don’t leave me behind. Don’t make me feel that I should change. And under that is the remembered, seen, waited for experience of death.

  There are real crack-ups. The hospitals are full of people who collapse when their parents die. This not bending to life, the emphatic denial saying that life must be this and not that, is terribly difficult—so difficult that few can bear to admit it.

  Clare knows that discovering what is more and what is less important holds a key to sorting life out. She knows that many battles she has fought in Parma have arisen from frustration and being different. Difference is another key that is difficult to understand but must not terrorize one. One traditional aspect of Catholicism emphasizes the group and a social dimension. It discourages, with strong boundaries, the idea of individualism involving competition. Sameness is stressed, being part of a group, like others. I can mention these thoughts without feeling critical or claiming that the observations have explanatory power: I simply feel my own difference, chafing. I often wonder what it would be like to have been raised in the radical wings of this inexhaustible faith. Instead I feel its ability to absorb and contain and outwait any protest to it.

  Clare knows that there are many ways of being strong. In the books she loves, War and Peace, Middlemarch, Emma, the feelings and beings she is attracted to are not found in the city’s customs. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary England, America, and Russia reflect ideas for a growing, educated middle class. Much flows from the Enlightenment ideas of individual freedom.

  Clare’s point of view may or may not be found here in the future. It depends. It has been microscopic in the past. Great family groups in the Parma countryside—the epic families of poverty and landowning wealth—tended toward the ideologies of Marxism and Catholicism as ways to structure society. In Parma, freedom of speech as a practice feels slightly collective. You can’t draw simply on your own authority in public. That would qualify you as gasata, a windbag, someone full of himself. You should generally put your thoughts in a context of politics and history. Freedom of speech as an individual right with consequences and the possibility to effect change is often perceived as elitist.

  Clare’s high school curriculum included few opportunities for innovation. No space for questions and deviations. No space for personal likes or dislikes. Or working in laboratories or participating in orchestras or pep rallies or literary reviews. She has had an education based on theory, on its beauty and patterns, as if empiricism were intellectually shabby, as if personal observation were irrelevant to the great work of studying the world. She has been offered little space for interpretation outside the sacredness of what has already been written in Italian. In the second year of high school, Clare’s teacher called me in to say that she had gone outside of the theme by expressing a personal view. “I thought,” I said, “that by age fifteen a kid might have some good ideas.” “No,” the woman replied seriously, “three years from now she will know enough to do so.” I understand the intellectual aspirations of her scheme, but I wonder if she understands the verb to deny, or the other one, to catch fire.

  The national high school curriculum rarely reaches World War II. Contemporary problems are not looked at. Ideological contexts are stressed as analytical tools. No research is done using far smaller ideas and hypotheses from one’s head or reading. High school is excellent schooling, but it introduces nearly permanent distance into much material. It doesn’t coax the private person out as an individual into felt, committed, or experimental positions. Bureaucrats and all sorts of ideological anarchists incubate in this training.

  Liceos are not secular organizations offering sports and activities. The scientific course is a beautiful, rigorous curriculum: five years of Latin, history, chemistry, physics, philosophy, Italian, a modern language, math, geometry, calculus. The way sciences are taught as theories conveys a strong message that there is no such thing as two cultures, science and humanities. Italians understand very well that all thought and learning arise from cultures developed by human minds. Students learn that there is no harm in acquiring a dead language. It is not wasted time. Syntax and translation are training in logic and precision. Messages in favor of the inescapability of complication and culture are useful in time. This is true at many levels. Nevertheless, by granting education this kind of authority a certain fixed border against change and loss is maintained. Where is the present in all this backward look? The deceit of liberal redemption has always been that it admits and accepts less than perfection. In its individualism, it favors one-sided solutions. There are no answers and the individual assumes responsibility for her actions.

  A student in Italy learns to bow to authority and to understand education as sacrifice. One learns to endure that feeling of no choice. Either you run through the maze of the curriculum without a single elective or you don’t graduate. There is pressure and humiliation. All test scores are publicly posted. Ranking is public. Humiliation is public. If you are good, you must help others and pull them through—even passing them answers on tests. Survival is a deep experience.

  Paolo is amazed at how university students are shy, blocked, and nearly unable to make public presentations. Most exams are oral and
nerves are the name of the game. Nevertheless, in a humanistic sense, Italian education forces you to organize and approach reality and history as problems distinct from yourself. If you are serious, you learn to bear frustration and to chastise sloth. If you get through, you’ll be as good as anyone in the world, and perhaps more generous.

  Clare’s dilemma is more existential and perhaps comes in part from having to choose to tear up her hard-earned roots. She has tried to fit and now she may discover, like many young people, that what she thinks is hers is not hers at all.

  I stop in a small, usually empty church some mornings to be alone. The space is as limited as an impoverished one-room school, especially in winter. The holy water is taken from the basin in winter so it won’t freeze. The wooden door, which smells of damp, creaks loudly. On the outside of the building is an image of the Regina Madre, Mary the Mother as Queen of Heaven, and she has a sword through her heart.

  I can identify with the sword even though the painted emotion makes me smile. The subject is a strong image for a mother, a wife, a person living in the world. Her sword is self-inflicted and as such represents a willingness to feel. As loose narrative, it is far from historical images in English of the educated, silent woman as mother. Yet it is a good, if inflated, picture of an actual feeling. Most Anglo-Saxon mothers I know hold a great deal of feeling about their children in silent hope and prayer.

  As a child in Wisconsin, I remember how Pastor B., in a nasal Milwaukee voice, harped on the sins of members of the Catholic church across the street from the granite Lutheran church where we sat, under a stained-glass window given by my father’s father. We were northerners, Germans, Swedes, and Norwegians, and they, with all their children, were from Ireland, Italy, and Poland. We were taught that Catholics were like rabbits.