Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  Giovanni Guareschi, whose script for the movie version of Don Camillo was written in the San Francesco jail in Parma, smuggled it out between the pages of two books. His imprisonment is another story of censorship and the community. He was imprisoned because he published a letter in Candido, a political magazine, that was allegedly written by Alcide De Gasperi, before he became the first Prime Minister of Italy. In the questionable letter, De Gasperi asks the Allies to bomb Rome. The courts found the letter to be false and charged Guareschi with inventing it. We may never know the whole story of the letter or what Guareschi hoped to achieve. But he served his sentence. It seems that Guareschi, who in a very conservative way was a champion of individual freedom, thought De Gasperi was a man who should not be looking to foreign countries for Italy’s political stability and solutions. Whether the letter was true or false, Guareschi was asserting a kind of political patriotism in his protest.

  The books in question, Vita di Benvenuto Cellini and La Poesia di Giuseppe Giusti, resting on a shelf in the Guareschi family library in Roncole, contained the smuggled movie script on typewritten pages, folded in quarters, until recently. His children noticed that the books were out of place. When they took them down from the shelf, the script fell out. They realized that their father had written it under the noses of complicit censors and smuggled his work out in the books. The go-between, who remained anonymous, had simply slipped the script and “their protective covers” back on the shelves. The script was written in violation of the rules of the prison.

  These Parma voices stand as examples of how censorship has had meaning in artists’ lives and how it has not had only one political coloring even in recent history. Resistance comes in all colors. The individual in Italy has nearly always had to accommodate the effects of politics. Italy’s history contains an unending tale of courageous, resourceful, and active anticonformists who have worked around and through politics while carrying forward social and moral concerns. I am left now with how to make the shift into a personal story about a different definition of censorship not seem irrelevant and trivial. Myriads of disapproving Italian intellectuals are murmuring “impossible.” I vaguely see them, like paintings in the Middle Ages, within crowded celestial rings, people who are never freely alone.

  A confidence I possessed became undefined and uncertain when I changed countries. It is the drama of exile; in trying to understand difference, one’s own differences get minimized and finally add to a broad sense of one’s insignificance. An individual is so terribly small without a community, a language, a set of shared values, a religion, a political role. Yet the three artists I just mentioned, as well as Giovanna, the abbess, and a noblewoman named Donella, whom I shall describe, each lived what was a resistance to much around them here. They seem to have arrived at the conclusion that there are no excuses, no ideal ways out. Everyone who turns any light on herself will find sadness and disorientation, ruins, missteps, as well as stupendous beauties and dreams. You change when you act, just as you exist when you stand your ground. The important thing is not to panic, not to give up what you can’t relinquish, and never to confuse life with art.

  In the fifteenth century, Donella Rossi Sanvitale joined in battle, wielding a sword, and inflicted a fatal wound on a close relative who was storming her husband’s castle. The advancing troop had been sent under her father’s order. The gracious castle was constructed on a rock in Sala Baganza, and her father, Pier Maria Rossi, a noble in Parma, after having arranged his daughter’s marriage in 1454, decided to undo the arrangement once Sanvitale no longer served his needs. The marriage had not enhanced Rossi’s own property and power as he had wished. He decided to attack, destroy the castle, and take his daughter home.

  Donella loved her husband, even though the marriage had been arranged. Rossi planned an assault on another of their castles in Noceto to draw Gilberto, her husband, away. In Gilberto’s absence, Donella battled to drive back her father’s men, led by a cousin. Donella was flanked by servants and her husband’s soldiers, but she chose to fight on the ramparts of the castle walls. Effective and brave, she plunged the sword into her relative unassisted.

  Affò, the historian who resurrected Giovanna’s deeds, compares Donella (could anyone ever not cite Greece?) to the greatest of the Spartan fighters. This mother of four children is celebrated in ringing rhetoric applauding her fight, her courage, and her female powers.

  A poem written about Donella at the age of twelve said she was gracious and beautiful, that her wisdom could guide anyone, and that no one could wish ill toward this fierce and capable young girl. After the fight, she was admired even more for her intelligence and ability to protect what was hers. Women, on the Po plain, burdened with all the labor of house and fields, have seemingly never been asked to hide their physical strength. Even educated noblewomen like Donella were applauded for it.

  Donella—fierce, gracious, wise—the story of your having fought on a rock with no water in the protecting moat sends out a very strong message. There is a sanguinary passion in this land and region. You broke a mold. You defied your father and defined loyalty as yours and to yourself. It was a violent struggle. It went all the way to the bone. There is hardiness in you and your power. The action went very deep. I can recognize your decisiveness in many women here. You, in some sense, possess the qualities of the model woman—fighting for family, defending your husband, your property, and your place at the center.

  Last night, a woman who designs gold jewelry, said to me, “My husband doesn’t decide anything. I do. And the boys listen to me. My husband is timid, but he follows along. He wouldn’t go anywhere. I’m the traveler and the boys get in line. I rented a cruiser. I took them up the mountain.” Her determination and glib confidence are quite characteristic. But the moatless rock, the cutting of cords, the clearing out of the past to stand battling and alone—that’s been lost, Donella, in your story. Perhaps it never existed. I need to rewrite your history because I am a writer. I need to tell the truth or I am lying. Until you stand alone, in no relation, except to yourself, that picture has not emerged. I want that for existence. As with Verdi and Toscanini, I want you standing your ground until we see you, even as a soldier, on your own.

  You’ve been forgotten here. You’re not taught in school. We haven’t remembered or tried to deconstruct you. Fighting your father as you did, you were fighting to come into your own existence. You killed. Instead, we see you, if we see you at all, as protecting your family. We don’t play with you and your meanings. How much did you love your husband? What did it feel like to kill your cousin? Did you doubt afterward or was it horrifyingly simple? You don’t travel like a strong historical stone that we can turn over for ourselves. Unlike Giovanna, you were victorious. Is that because you, in the end, didn’t defend yourself using ideas? You killed.

  William Carlos Williams, in writing about poetry, said, “Place is the true core of the universal.” Moving to Italy made place a vast body that I had to reenter in all its difference. Literally, the place I started from generated only denial in Parma. I finally overcame this inhibiting and crushing sensation. As an artist, I had always been a rebel by holding on to that right to free space and difference, but as a woman, an American, and an immigrant in a situation where family was omnipresent and overwhelming, I discovered that I was not clear at all about my place, the meaning of private and public, of found and not found. I lost my sense of free speech and found the local definition of women that was held out to me alien, as I looked to them for friendship. Italian women, too, are protected by law in terms of inheritance. Going back through most Italian history, all legitimate children, male or female, are guaranteed a share of each parent’s property upon his or her death. Even in the poorest circumstances, women usually possess some money or property from inheritances. This, in its way, bestows some actual sense of identity and independence through family lines.

  I hide, you hide, we hide, they hide. I conjugate the verb and wonder at it. I do it again
. It is hypnotizing. I must address the I hiding, the you, the we. They. It’s powerful and empty. They has always been a false position. I can’t speak about a they.

  In Parma I thought I could balance like a circus performer on a large ball not touching the earth. In the years Clare was small and Alba was fighting over her grandson, I tried, in that old Quaker expression, “to keep my peace.” My feet would turn and take thousands of small swift steps, trying not to slip. First in my private space, the home, and then where I always freely expressed myself, public space, I gradually got lost.

  The Italian family is overwhelming. In a normal Italian marriage, both partners come in with a strong set of supporting casts. I, like most Americans, came in alone. Privacy is not defined as important inside the Italian family. Even the bathroom can be invaded by relatives of the second rank, and without thinking, a spouse will give you no support. Even your drawers can be opened and rearranged because they don’t fit a scheme. Words will not stop it. You are being stiff or a snob. People will tell you that you are wrong or that you should be doing something differently. They may not even mean it. They will share and boss and do what they feel like. The experience was entirely alien to what I knew. The solutions I would call wisdom or working it out or respect had little credence. Freedom was defined as something that, in spite of its promise, is never free. Family should be allowed to enter it with impunity. In the entire five years of elementary school, Clare was taught and forced to fill all white space in a drawing. It was a rule. It was good for you. There was no choice. It wouldn’t hurt. Family often feels like that.

  I was one to give people space. I believed in personal expression. I hoped and spoke, always more quietly, until what I said seemed almost like marvelous secrets. I have always believed people should find their own paths. But this idea was very distant from the world lying in front of me. As people around me shouted and dictated, I refused to enter the fray except as a passive resister. My body fought for me. I swelled and ached, not yet shapeless, but that was coming, lapping at each joint. I dismissed my own gut.

  In pain, I was on treacherous women’s ground. It was behavior unfamiliar to me, and yet I was imitating in some way all the women in my family. I lacked social definition, by country, by language. But like my grandmother, my aunt, and my mother, each of whom abandoned independence for the most anonymous housewifery and what they imagined to be the status quo and the advantages inside it, I kept, in my quietness, their quietness alive. It was not all bad; much of my quest lay in meditation and a need to discover things, in what seemed like passivity, by myself. But my passivity also meant, unintentionally, that my ideas had no play. The idea of example, living by example, was laughable and quite impossible to convey. And much jarring—unintentionally cruel and unnecessary—didn’t let up under requests that it change. Words were walked right over.

  When I fought, I often felt that I was asking Clare to take sides, to do things my way. When she did something that seemed to me unlike her, I often called her to task for conforming, and insisted that she should only do what she really wanted to do. I added to her conflicts and the splits and tears in simple actions. I broke my own rules for a family over and over. My in-laws told me I didn’t understand even my own daughter. I knew that a child wants to be the same as everyone else, but I couldn’t bear, for example, that in school she was learning how to cheat and lie. I couldn’t bear to see her arranging her stories according to whom she was telling them to. I came to see that I must, whether I liked it or not, speak out, resist, react. At the same time, I had to get outside the oppressive established order in my own life. And it was for myself. I could not always flow into Clare’s life and her own solutions as she tried to settle. I had my own growing disasters and stalled hopes to work on.

  As is often the case, from the outside the event was so ordinary that no one could have guessed how much my life changed that afternoon. Perhaps the gut ache that kept me awake for three nights had already announced its importance to me.

  It happened in a public speech in a dingy university classroom of not more than fifteen people. The lecture had been conceived by an organization for university teachers. The woman who had contacted me for the task made an instant and unusual connection. She came to the house to personally ask me to give a lecture on a vague topic that I generally avoided—“Being an American.” We chitchatted for a few moments and her life story poured out. Her candor admonished me to say “yes.” How could I refuse a woman who told me, as we stood in the hall, how she had broken into two pieces? For a few minutes, I was inside a vortex of madness that she had lived for nearly a year.

  After a breakdown, the doctors in Parma had heavily drugged her and told her there was no way out. She felt suicidal and finally found a woman doctor who allowed her to come off the heavy doses of tranquilizers. “She told me to walk and to breathe, to not stay inside, to move and keep going. She told me I had to decide to live. For nine months I lived in near-total darkness, but I walked and kept walking. I had no idea where I was going. I had no sense I could even get through the day. One afternoon I picked up a pen and wondered if I would be able to write my name. I hesitated for some time. I was staring into the bottom of an abyss. I sat with a pen and my hand trembled. I could remember nothing—all the literature I knew, French, German, my own life—vague, blurred. But I thought the time had come. The letters came out. I formed my first and last names. I looked at the script and it seemed a dull, slightly distant acquaintance. I felt my body and mind panting, panting and coming to rest on that page.” You—I thought to myself as the old gray head finished her story—you are a real sister.

  I knew a few of the people in the audience. They were teachers. I even knew one was gay, afraid to come out. I was supposed to speak as an American. I knew I was expected to be intellectual about America, and that means to speak badly of how it resorts to the death penalty and how 30 percent of the country is poor. I know that liberal part of myself very well; I stood with the intellectuals. But I realized that I had to speak from place itself, a different place, more universal because it is made from the contradictory and dancing particles that configure into particulars. I had to speak as myself, as a woman and a soul who was suffering. I had to talk about denial and all the secrecy in closed spaces where positions remain untouched. I had to bring this to others.

  I began by saying I was worn out by living in Parma, worn out by the obscenity of having to defend myself and my differences and to apologize for saying I believed in some simple ideas of good. I said that I objected, a priori, to the idea of “impossible.” For me, short of death, nothing was impossible and even that reality had its challengers, starting with Christ. I talked about the solitude we share and the need to walk forward toward the authentic, which starts in strange, humble places. I said we all try to be too safe and too small. “You scoff,” I said, “at simplicity, as if it were a lack of culture; yet simplicity is difficult to obtain and often is a valuable synthesis. Each of us looking in might find an old manipulating Vatican inside, a grinning, domineering white, an oppressed black, a male and a female, a fear of our sexual powers, a wild wish to be free. What do we mean by difference, by limits?” I remember scanning people’s eyes and faces and finding skepticism. Emerson’s dream—in which an angel brings him an apple, the world, and tells him to eat it—flashed in my head. How sour the apple in front of me had turned. I took a long, slow breath.

  History has to be reviewed and studied, but with the utmost attention to truth, I pointed out, feeling like a fool. “This means questioning,” I said. “Many periods feel as our present era does. Uncertainty about the meaning of definitions is not new. Correggio, when he was painting in Parma, was experiencing the end of Catholicism’s singular hold on Christianity. The rise of capitalism was a period of intense confusion over definition and man’s basis for meaning. One telling aspect of the American Revolution vis-à-vis the French one was perhaps the difference in the economic and religious makeup of those who ca
rried them forward. Nevertheless, since those two events, we have had political definitions as well as religious ones that hold out for the rights and the existence of an individual self.” I said this to faces looking for intellectual backup for the horrendous lapses that they were listening to. I didn’t oblige them.

  I remembered the writers I was working with in my writing group, and how difficult it was to make them leave the past and the culture they drew from books. I could not convince them to trust themselves and to create from an internal, personal direction. “In modern history, the ‘I’ has to create and hold its space,” I said to the audience. “This is demanded from the state. The citizen creates the state. In this sense private feeds public. Sometimes you still bring out as a defense that you were subjects for too long and not citizens.

  “Most of you are teachers,” I said, trying not to sound judgmental, “but you won’t permit any student to say I like this or I don’t like that. You confuse literary study and historical study with a political agenda. You love the neat and the fixed and the abstract. Why are you so frightened by the personal? Trust yourselves and trust them. How else can personal responsibility be built and belief understood? This promise was and still is very great in America. I want to reproduce some of its attractiveness for you. I want to point out some energies that you might have overlooked or even falsified in your insistence on capitalistic barbarism.” There were snickers, but I was on the other side. I was in place. It was a country that didn’t exist that way, even for me. I was in my imagination.