Pastor B. pointed out that nowhere in the Bible is it said that Mary should be worshipped or women considered equal to God. He scowled over the Catholic idols and false images. Women were to keep their place. Martin Luther said, “Men have broad chests, narrow hips, and understand much more than women, who have small breasts, large hips, and are destined to stay at home, following domestic affairs, giving birth to and raising children.” In the four hours of weekly catechism class away from ears that might have judged him, he told us that if we doubted his word it meant that we were in the hands of the devil. Pastor B. was a man who made me wish I were deaf.
Inside the Parma church a life-sized, compassionate Mary Magdalene is washing Christ’s feet on the cross. On the left wall is a full-sized painting of Mary as a woman, with a halo of spellbinding stars. In the right corner, near the candles, is a blue statue of Mary. On the right wall, St. Joseph is holding a baby. The small church celebrates Mary Magdalene, not a mother, but the woman who was a companion to Christ, a sinner, a risk taker, late to arrive at a sense of self. The little church has a shaded feeling. The windows are high, plain half circles. The painted images of women are human copies of the rez’dora of Parma, the physically strong head of the household, large, concrete, capable of help and hard work. The images have been generated by actual faces. There is something unnerving about them.
The message runs that the women are the problem solvers. The women keep life moving. Their expressions are not sensitive; they are sui generis. They have a say and a proprietary role. The full-sized Mary could be a Fascist painting of a movie star. Dressed in blues and browns, with eyes raised to some distant point, the women in the different symbolic images on the walls are giants. They can listen and bear all that happens.
And I ask myself: Who are they now? What would U.S. feminists make of them? But I didn’t come in as an anthropologist, observing difference. I entered as a human being looking for an open door. I came in to escape the pressure of words. I was looking for a clearing. Thought, action, brushing one’s hair, eating tortelli, not sleeping last night, voting for Signor X—I was looking for space outside these necessary confines and definitions.
Each day someone opens the church around seven and lights the tacky stand of warm electric candles, with the blue Mary behind it. Sometimes someone else is inside. This morning a tall, thin man was standing, head bowed, very near what the poet Philip Larkin calls “the holy end.” He was praying to Mary. I felt an intruder, until I found a pitch of quiet I could enter. Usually I stand alone. Last week an old white-haired man had his head on a pew and was down on his knees. It is moving to come upon someone in a cramped space, like going around a curve and meeting someone else’s need head-on. Community is a delicate definition that I can’t articulate but feel.
Time is opening its tight fist and can explode. A month. A year. Or that final beat; no more.
[16]
THE “IN” BASKET
Today a glitch in the starvation mail service. An end to a general feeling of desert and unreachability. Mail caught in heaps and unsorted bags, for some reason, appeared: a feast of four letters, some journals from another season, bills that are more than a month late. Everything in its own time, I say to myself, and smile at the familiar addresses.
“The surf was breaking spectacularly at Russian Gulch State Park—huge waves at high tide, higher than we had ever seen them. Some looked scary even standing on the cliff. The spray from one must have risen thirty feet higher than the top of the cliff.”
“In haste. Today was not my best day. TV went bad, alarm system not working, I fell down the stairs. A few minor scratches.”
“I can understand your struggle in writing about Ginzburg. There is undoubtedly a modernity in her work, in her thinking and surely in her life. It is filled with examples of extreme sensitivity and the complexity of a conscience that seems to be forever locked in a strange subversive mobility and a passion for self-freedom.”
“I realized from N.’s words that the sheer effort to organize so seemingly small a thing as a couple of lectures was a Herculean one, that we order these matters more easily in the States than one does in Italy, that the injecting any iota of change or any new breeze into the mother of civilizations is like pushing one’s stone, Sisyphus-like, uphill. She, incidentally, exuded genuine sweetness and muted sadness, as if wondering what the right path might be, what the next step.”
These letters are now stacked in a basket on top of my desk. They make me feel close, the way friendship can, to feelings, to existence and existing. They defy a gnawing sense of isolation, and yet that is inexact. They whet my appetite for conversation, for moving about. They also represent some beginning of a professional life—ways of relating to people through my writing and work. They vary and come from varied voices and places.
The Italian mails are more dysfunctional than ever before. Who knows when another batch will appear? Our mailman is talking of civil war and people who are fed up. I tried discussing it with him, telling him his words were just hot air. “No, Missus,” he kept saying. “The popolo has been screwed.”
My letters rest on top of some I have copied down, written by Giuseppe Verdi. They may fit somewhere in “Book.” I got that message over E-mail. Willard called my project Book, as if it were a baby. He made me laugh as he often does. I like Verdi’s letters. They jump with impatience, self-pity, and recuperative power. His blunt energies and superseded conflicts resound in the jocund volleys of many people I know here.
“I am very, very grateful for the letter you wrote me, but at the same time I am very mortified! Mortified because I should have written as soon as I got here: instead you beat me to it. Ah, I am really a big (you baptize me). The fact is that although I have been on the earth such a long time and have seen everything, I have learned very little and the peasant’s hide is still there, and often the old country fellow from Roncole comes out, in all his greatness.”
Verdi’s insistent acceptance of his whole (in many aspects terrifying) being is what gives him such energy. Tommaso, who came for lunch yesterday, as he ate prosciutto and drank malvasia, said, “How good I feel being back. How nice it is to eat with friends. The wine is so profumato.” I felt happy to see him, back from Malaysia, where he is working on Third World nutrition. Suddenly, inside the occasion and the subtlety of profumato, we imbibed the charm and stability of Parma.
Underneath Verdi’s letters are some essays from the writing class that folded last year. The work was excellent, yet there was never any momentum. Continuing would have entailed change. It would have acknowledged that we must examine our assumptions. A personal essay from the lone male gives a sense of the intensity and passionate integrity of Communist intellectuals and where F. places the self, how he envisions it, the self that grew up in dire poverty.
“The only thing that keeps us from the temptation of turning into real wolves is our devotion to the arts and, with these, a moral sense that will not allow us to favor individual rights at the expense of neglecting our duty to fight for the pack and collective salvation.” He goes on to describe the poverty of his family: “Oh, we argued all right, like most sisters and brothers. We occasionally fought against one another, but we knew we needed a shelter. Because we had always seen life as a battlefield and peace was unknown to our world. So we would always go back into the cozy sharing premises of a reassuring feeling: there was no doubt, we were sharing the same destiny, we were not alone on the raft in the storm, and rescue was not a privilege of any one of us because none of us would stand the prospect of being saved alone.
“We were like a pack of wolves which had learned—by instinct and training—that union means survival. It was the awareness of belonging to a pack that also preserved the last gleams of our personal identities and allowed our individual selves to grow stronger and stronger, in spite of the daily blows of poverty, humiliation, and rootlessness. Although wolves are said to be gregarious animals, each of them is quite different from t
he other members of the group. If you want to get rid of them—Jack London or Kipling said—you will have to shoot the lot. Hungry wolves will go on fighting to the end, even alone, because the pack, in their minds, gives their distinct ways of living and fighting a meaning and special strength.”
F. insisted that he had no time to continue. What would it serve, this dwelling on the past? What was the use of writing, since his wasn’t art?
There is also a scrap of poetry from one of the younger women. Her young motherly face flushed when she confessed to the other women around the table that for the very first time, working on a poem about her child while she was taking a shower, she felt absolutely new. She had never thought of herself as someone who had something to say. She asked her husband if he could understand. “You look the same to me,” he told her. That disappointed her, because, she said, “it was amazing, truly a feeling I had never had. As the hot water poured down me, I discovered that in the whole of my life as a student and as a teacher I had never in all those years put a word on paper thinking it was for me or, more interesting, from me. Girls, I stayed in the shower until there was not one drop of hot water left.”
I have never quite accepted that the writing group couldn’t go on. I was bitterly disappointed. After two years, I couldn’t push and nag them forward any longer like a mother. The faith to take up a quest—that space to do their lives justice never arrived. There were probably as many reasons as there were participants, but one idea for resisting was certainly that the class was private, not official. The region should organize, approve, and pay for such efforts. Writing classes should have didactic structures to them; otherwise they were nothing more than personal. Another reason was family. The women didn’t want to meet on Sunday, the only free day many had because they were teachers. That day was for seeing relatives: their complaints were about these pressures. “You don’t know,” one of the more productive writers said to me, “how lucky you are because you don’t have a mother to take care of—a mother who complains, demands, and tells you you’re egocentric.”
The chair was not as simple as its stiff virtuousness seemed
[17]
CALVIN’S CHAIR
The issue of defining free speech has arisen each year that I have lived in Italy. For me, it goes straight to my heart. Sometimes it touches an identity pertaining to country, sometimes it centers on denial, on censorship and its array of meanings to an individual.
It is absolutely true, on one level, that Italy is one of the freest countries in the world. There is not a day that goes by in the present crisis, this endless uncovering of deeper and deeper layers of corruption and false arrangements, that I am not struck by how much is discussed, debated, analyzed, and freely joked about. Free speech has a very great intellectual expanse. Yet free speech is often a dance, calculating, unyielding, fixed—a set of sounds and furies that often don’t mean what they say, abstractions very far from facts or life in the present. I could run an analysis of it, as the newspaper analysts do, from every point of view, yet I want to get at something else—a friction in me.
Many voices challenging censorship and, thus, expanding free speech in the Parma region have been artists. Their interest in truth is specific and as forceful as trumpet blasts. Giuseppe Verdi experienced artistic, political, and social censorship. Living and working in the decades in which Italy was trying to unify, his music often gave aspirations to a country that hoped but did not yet know if it existed. His librettos never sidestepped the dark contradictions of character and power. The subjects, in their expressiveness, gave independence to feelings that often were literally dangerous.
Verdi’s great choruses embodied collective voices that had no voice—the poor as well as the educated, most of whom suffered under the occupation of foreign rulers. Like Mazzini in politics, in some way Verdi’s artistic vision was liberal: not merely political, but social and requiring great moral strength. In Nabucco and I Lombardi melodies pass from one person, one group, to another, in swells of public consciousness.
Liberty was risky and was also the issue of the day. There were the radicals who wanted Italy to become a country, a republic; the moderates who wanted help from the house of Savoy; and the conservatives who wanted the Papal States to govern. Verdi stood with the Republicans. His censors in the north were the occupying Austrians and the Catholic Church. Their unaesthetic political concerns were a presence throughout most of his life. Verdi’s exasperated resistances required enormous amounts of energy and moral courage, as well as the realism to see when he could not get his way. Putting the idea of liberty and power into characters was always a problem because of repressive control. Even on opening night, the struggle over content might be unsettled and redhot.
Stiffelio, a drama about a Protestant minister and his adulterous wife, which used biblical texts as lyrics, is one kind of example of offense to the community that Verdi’s feeling for liberty embraced. It was unthinkable that Christ’s words for forgiveness could be uttered on a stage. The censors could not allow Protestantism to be portrayed as a religion in which individual conscience mediated guilt. After the censors worked out their objections, the character of the pastor was stripped of authority and he had to become an ordinary member of a sect. The power emanating from his pulpit is taken away. Since Catholic priests cannot marry (the idea of sex for men of God officially renounced), the person pardoned in the scene is not his wife. The person’s sex is not clear. The drama, and also the universe representing another way of life, is diminished until art cannot make it come alive to an audience. Verdi denounced the opera’s “castration.”
On opening night in Milan, some of the singers wanted to perform the original text. They were under court order not to deviate. Nevertheless, some uncensored librettos mysteriously circulated. The performance had many ups and downs, and in the end the censors were attacked for the “ruin of the score.” The experience is not uncommon in the history of Verdi’s art.
Here is a letter as he starts work on what becomes Rigoletto: “I might have yet another subject, which, if the police were to permit it, would be one of the greatest creations of modern theater. Who knows? They allowed Ernani; maybe they [the police] would permit this too. And here [in my score] there are no conspiracies… . PS: As soon as you get this letter, get yourself four legs: run all over the city and try to find an influential person who can get the permission for Le Roi s’amuse [Victor Hugo’s work and the basis for the plot]. Don’t go to sleep; get moving; hurry.”
The libretto becomes a long, painful set of struggles and compromises. In his letters, he expressed the sense of frustration and humiliation. “The old man’s curse, so original and sublime in the original, becomes ridiculous here, because the motive that drives him to utter the curse no longer has its original importance, and because he is no longer a subject who speaks so boldly to the King. Without this curse, what purpose, what meaning, has the drama? The Duke becomes a useless character and the Duke absolutely must be a libertine … without that, this drama is impossible.” “What difference does the sack make to the police? Are they afraid of the effect it has? But I allow myself to say: Why do they think they know more about this than I do? Who is the Maestro? Who can say this will be effective and that will not be?”
Perhaps even more difficult than the struggle for artistic liberty and truth, but certainly consistent with his personality, was his resistance to social pressure in his private affairs. In the village of Sant’Agata, too, Verdi expressed himself and violated what were very common assumptions. Living with Giuseppina Strepponi, once a brilliant soprano and the mother of several illegitimate children, he offended nearly everyone. (His first wife and their two children had all tragically died of illness within four years of his marriage.) Strepponi and he did not marry until Verdi was forty-six.
But when Verdi filed a lawsuit against his own parents, asserting that “Carlo Verdi has to be one thing, Giuseppe Verdi something else,” he was perhaps creating an even more
offensive breach. Verdi broke with his parents. He dissolved their financial interdependency, and even officially protested their use of a chicken coop, the rights to which he took away from his mother. He evicted his parents from a house they had helped pay for. He didn’t respond to their growing debts, and eventually he legally separated from them altogether. His behavior cost him the approval of the community. In the final contract with his father, you see his harshness and exasperation. You feel in those final conditions, when he pays back his debts and offers them a small house and stipend, that he has gone to great lengths to publicly violate a code. He doesn’t want to conform and be forced to live in the community according to their rules of common decency. He insists, unambiguously, on disturbing the common illusions and customs, while making it clear where he stands. Dutiful morality will not bind him, and he chafes at people’s determination to judge. His behavior is monstrous.
Arturo Toscanini, whose birthplace, a small, narrow, dark, wooden-beamed stone structure, is on the western side of the torrente Parma, is another giant, godlike figure who in his artistic positions also resisted and took up issues of censorship. The badly typed transcripts of his tapped telephone conversations, once he begins to resist Fascism, mark the beginning of Toscanini’s exile. His emotional letter explaining to Wagner’s daughter, who is fascinated by Hitler, how he will not serve as the director at Bayreuth, is extremely sad but explicit: what he thought was a “temple” is an “all-too-common theatre.” He gives up his chance to be the director at Salzburg as Hitler’s power grows. He telegrams Bruno Walter: “It’s useless for me to wait for your letter My decision is final however painful stop I have only one way to think and act I hate compromises I walk and shall always walk on the straight path that I traced in life.” His fire finds him accepting an invitation to direct the orchestra in Palestine in 1937, as if to raise a sound: we must open our hearts. His uncensored voice is the one that can often be heard shouting over the whole of the NBC Orchestra in recordings made in the 1950s in America. It erupts, driving the music and commanding the musicians to give more. In the small museum in the house in Parma where he was born, there is a documentary made by an American. It is possible to watch Toscanini frolicking and turning somersaults with his grandchildren and to see his arms conducting in a sequence that reveals that he directs music by making figure eights, circular movements that neither begin nor end, but move like giant signs for infinity. His energy beats in lifted, sharpened rhythm.
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