Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  James Joyce, who was homesick for Dublin, often felt he was too harsh about his own city. “I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality,” he wrote. That was the way I felt as I began talking about America’s largeness and its freedom of speech.

  I knew that I was out, saying things that I might not have said in California. Indeed I might have practically maintained the opposite. But in place we work toward the universal. It is sparks and pieces that come together as the mind organizes them into something viable and true, where the I at least for some moments touches the same thing in someone else. The talk was still flowing forward. I noticed that people were avoiding my eyes. And then something really strange happened to me.

  In Geneva, where I regularly visit Susan Tiberghien, a wonderful writer friend whom I met in Russia, we once wandered into the cathedral looking for Calvin’s chair. It had been temporarily moved for a concert. We slipped into a cleaning closet off to the left of the altar and there it was, nestled among brooms and pails and mops. The chair sat at attention, stiff and wooden as a chair could be. The dark back rose absolutely ramrod rigid. The seat, a small tight triangle (the place for the butt), couldn’t possibly fit a real body. The chair’s weak, chilling arms were inhuman. Here was a silhouette of unbending conscience, belief, will. Pulled out of the cathedral, the chair was out of context, out of history. It was unimportant, expressive of its traps. The chair was no longer an icon: the image and origin of capitalism itself. It was liberating to see the chair so carelessly tossed, so lightly treated. In the broom closet, outside its context, it made us break into undisturbed laughter.

  Yet I recognized that chair as familiar and belonging to a part of me. It was about separations, of church and state, body and mind, virtue and grace. It was a core in Protestantism, American correctness, and an unbending masculine logic. The chair was painful, complicated, not as simple as its stiff virtuousness seemed.

  As I was speaking, it appeared from nowhere. For the last part of my remarks in the classroom, Calvin’s chair seemed to circle a decently safe distance from my head. It was not quite a windmill, and I was not quite out of my village. It was more like a flying menace.

  I looked up and saw the chair as a giant that I had been clinging to in my life in Italy. I used its spine and that sense of apartness. Somewhere it was my lost tribe, the mythically principled tribe of my own poor father. I did in some crazy way accept and fear its deforming, overriding posture. Somewhere, too, I cherished that harsh simple sense of greater and lesser good. Indeed, that chair, which I had purposely left behind so long before, was flying around me, asking me to say what it meant.

  I went on with my talk in English, but the chair’s growing presence grew larger in my mind. I was appalled at how little space it left for what might have been a female body or a female voice. I wanted it to slow down, to see it full face, to capture it and fling it out, or to mount it and ride, or to set it aside for what it had been: the past, an imposition, a childhood identity which had long ago become too small. But it whirled on as a phantom conscience.

  Somehow, I continued. I told the fifteen people, more silent than I had ever imagined was possible (no one reacted as if my words had affected them), that in searching for perspectives, being a woman is ground for new speech. Understanding the past, and imagining languages slightly at odds with it, is what lies ahead. For some time, we will speak from the point of view of difference. I said all that as the chair opened up another front. I could feel my life in its vortex whirlwind being pulled apart and together.

  There was light applause. No one told me they liked my observations. No one said that I had shown them something new about America. Overall, I could feel the predictable judgment that I had been gasata, overassuming, inconclusive—that I had said nearly nothing by talking about myself.

  The chair was the only thing rushing after me down the stairs. It whined loudly like a piercing chain saw nearing the end of a trunk. I had had no idea that I was so affected by Protestantism—its sense of conscience but more by its concept of belief and grace. I remember gratefully losing sight of Calvin and Luther and those harsh judgments when I lived with Paolo and Clare in California, enjoying the fat lemons on the trees outside our door. Here in Parma, in spite of how I wanted to escape rigidity, I discovered it was still part of me, inexpungible, humorous, even useful. The whole Calvinist contraption roaringly came loose as I uncensored my public voice. I might well be stiff and willful, an individual insisting on an abstract moral point. No one was more surprised than I. There was nothing pink or silky, nothing feathered or curvy, or funny or friendly—but it was funny. Oh, there was something wondrously funny in that flying machine. Outside of me, I could appreciate the way it stirred things up. Out of me, I could feel the brushing of a nonseen, nonstiff essence that moved with human feeling somewhere inside my being. I could sense it was far from a mechanistic chair. Unafraid, willing to differ, it appeared to be my long-lost power of speech.

  In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, speech is taken away from women many times. They often possess a compensatory capacity to write or even to weave as a way of giving messages. But speech is a more profound loss.

  Philomela, tongueless, after being violated by her brother-in-law, tells her story finally in a tapestry that she sends to her horrified sister. Io loses speech as she is transformed by Jove: “When she tried to plead, she only lowed, and her own voice filled her with terror.” She could identify herself by writing. But that capacity remained less complete and satisfying than speech with human breath, its heat and listening.

  If she could talk

  she would ask for help, and tell her name and sorrow,

  but as it was, all she could do was furrow

  the dust with one forefoot, and make an I,

  and then an O beside it, spelling her name,

  telling the story of her changed condition.

  Ocyrhoë, who learned prophetic speech, defies the Fates, who object to her using language for these ends. She endures the wrath of heaven and loses her ability to speak.

  And even as she spoke, the words were neither

  human nor neighing, but the kind of sound

  made when men try to imitate the horses,

  … she was changed,

  completely, voice, appearance, even name.

  I marveled at the image of Cyane. She is a goddess unable to help Ceres look in the proper place for her daughter, Demeter, who has been taken to the underworld.

  The image of the witness’s helplessness because she has lost her shape struck me deeply. Cyane knows but can’t speak.

  And in her silent spirit kept the wound

  incurable, and, all in tears, she melted,

  dissolving, queen no longer of those waters.

  Her limbs were seen to soften, and her bones

  became more flexible and the nails’ hardness

  was gone: … it is no great distance

  from slimness to cool water … till there was nothing

  for anyone to hold… . Were the nymph not water

  she would have told her everything; she tried to

  but had no lips, no mouth, no tongue to speak with.

  The image of knowing but being unable to speak, of turning into a wound, is a profound image of displacement. Besides all the richness of its psychological suggestion, concerning the interrelationships between women in this story of sex and possession, it is a perfect image of the immigrant, the expatriate, the woman who leaves home and is unable to find ways to join to the new without giving up on the old. Her most intimate powers to communicate are displaced. They become invisible, unseen. Trying to explain, she discovers that the place, the core, cannot be articulated. Dissolution is her reality and state.

  The silence of writing outside of any exchange, of having others know what you write, is still another level of speech loss. Writing about things that are under people’s noses but not being able to convey that to them in everyday speech and living, becau
se the shared perceptions are not there in the tissues of the admitted culture, is a problem with no way out. It is an old problem and speaking to it can only help open it up.

  Oh, Ovid, in exile on the Black Sea, grieving, miserable, always full of complaint, you left us so many creative and often terrifying pictures. Exiled, unable to live as you wished, you compressed life into unending stories of events that alter the self. You loathed the imprisonment of the provinces. You felt wasted in the boondocks, cut off from powerful Rome. You wrote letters trying to interest the emperor in your condition. You tried to be good, nearly perfect, believing, almost like a woman, that thus you might merit notice. But no one answered your letters.

  You had no library on the Black Sea. What you wrote you carried in your head. How vast were your resources once you were forced to get down to work. You remind me of what Primo Levi told us: that in Auschwitz, Dante kept him alive. When evil nauseated and racked, marauding until the world seemed wretchedly without light, Levi’s memories of culture, like slides under a microscope, distant and yet remarkably sharp, kept him sane. Inside Levi’s head, the memorized passages spoke as part of him. Together these works held together as a makeshift compass. The trembling needle pulled true north to a world Levi could no longer see or touch.

  Ovid, you are so different from Levi. You have so little of the stoic. Your problem remains of another order. Primo Levi stands in a ring nearly alone in pain and flame. Who can imagine the weight of the witnessing of Primo Levi? To keep our eyes focused on the descent into hell, I always remember that one glance was too much for Orpheus. Instead Levi would not turn his head from what he had lived and could remember from the concentration camps. He went through the bones, through the ovens, through his own life, his own actions, the meaning of language, the smell of the watery soup; he didn’t want to falsify one datum, one fact. He kept returning with a more finely honed sieve, to catch the grains, the little virtues, the human acts, the level where the universal appears from the facts. He went searching for patterns, hoping that in his objectivity he could learn how the Holocaust happened and how to prevent another. There was no answer. He was rational, a believer in scientific truth and humanistic values. In a century of world wars, he opened his eyes to human beings and found them alone in a universe, without any God. There was no satisfactory explanation for him except that people had been wrongly educated.

  Ovid, your problem was completely different. This is important, I think. This is not as true for works as for a life. We must never forget context when looking at a life in itself. I think about this often for women as they begin to write about their lives. It is important for Italians as they come to see that no group can speak for them. I believe what C. S. Lewis said. No pain can be compared. We cannot measure pain. Even if it seems apparent, we cannot say one person suffers one hundred times more than someone else. Each person’s suffering is his own.

  Admit it, Ovid, you were a complainer. You had once lived high on the hog and your banishment was terrible, primarily for its dullness, the distance it put you from power. To keep yourself alive you accepted the task of exploring myths, all you remembered about them. You nearly wrote a picture of the Black Sea itself. You captured the eternal inevitablity of breakup and caprice and unstoppable tides.

  How did you know that the shapeless pool of a woman trying to bear witness to a seduction fit well with the story of a mother looking for her lost daughter? How, Ovid, did you transmit so stunningly the unalterable power of a life’s connection with events driven by the gods, if not because you entered an exploration of your own situation? You wrote, Ovid, starting from your feet’s memory of ground. Sitting still, in exile, living a fate devouring you through your own feelings, you told the paradox over and over: no one escapes change.

  Today is a sensuous peach—a fat, juicy day, with dark green leaves

  [18]

  DARKLING I LISTEN

  Today is a sensuous peach—a fat, juicy day, with dark green leaves. I hold it in my hands, press its fullness, and feel a summer joy. Nothing outside of writing is on the agenda. The idea of interpreting each and every detail is truly a sacrifice and nearly suffocating. I have crusts on my eyes. Would that I could say these aching boils were from looking at life, but I know the problem comes from the pollution and a tenacious virus in Parma. Many people we know have flaming eyeballs, red as medieval monsters. Virginia Woolf said that the act of writing essays as opposed to fiction is that of “drawing a curtain over the world.” She captured in that powerful image the conscious construction of nonfiction. For an imaginative writer it is a sharp process of closing off what is usually available as reality. The choices are endless, and the ripples in the fabric are for me the main task.

  About four o’clock this morning, I lay awake on our wrinkled, twisted sheets. The dark was about to turn away, and in the warm silence coming through the screens, I could hear trains on the tracks miles from our house. The city is partially empty, and the sound of the trains travels from the other side of the city, past the Teatro Regio, past the Steccata, up over the walls of the Cittadella. With open windows we hear them. The viaduct for the train works like a sound chamber in the empty streets. The short high blasts of the whistles and the long clicking whir enter my night and speed off.

  Parma in summer expands to green leafy avenues of horse chestnut trees with black bark, a few extra stands with watermelons piled like cannonballs along the roads at night, Chirico emptiness in the streets, humid blanket heat, small string concerts in the open lit courtyards, thunderstorms, and the nostalgic sound of trains.

  Factories that produce and process food don’t shut down for the obligatory month of August. Night shifts begin in June. Trucks loaded with tomatoes and onions form long, steady convoys. In the flat countryside, hemmed with irrigation ditches that bubble and gleam, the wheat has already been cut, by combines and tractors that belong to cooperatives. Round hay bales weighing several hundred pounds recall the yellowness of rich wheels of Parmesan cheese. Left like fertility idols on the fields, they appear everywhere like enigmas.

  In our garden, passion flowers with purple filaments and green stamens open along the fence. The upstairs people have surreptitiously trimmed the plant back until it has nowhere to stretch. White butterflies with black spots fill up on the flitches of lavender in the two vases near our front door. Roses that I planted this spring have come out, a candelabra of thick yellow flames. I decided to leave on the bush’s nametag: Gioia, Joy. Pietro planted one soon after and left the tag on. It’s called Ombra, Shadow. It makes me giggle. The garden, since the four of us have wildly opposing ideas, is a remarkable feat; it is nearly a family. We keep it up: half is raked and sprayed; half is loose and blowsy.

  My raspberry canes in the back look like they’ve been dipped in wiggling powdered sugar. Paolo pointed out that the maple tree is sick, and for this reason, the aphids’ sticky white larvae have colonized other plants. “They’re exiles. And the ants you see springing from cover, they will assault the raspberry stalks and milk the aphids.” His observations follow contours, for me, that vaguely reflect depression. He’s still mourning after nearly two years. Yet it could as well be his usual precision and the facts of nature’s way of doing business.

  Ken McKenzie was here last night. He comprises a part of summer, like the night of San Lorenzo, the night of the shooting stars, August 10, when we go out into the foothills, lie on our backs, and watch for wild streaks from the Milky Way. It is one more lovely feast in a calendar built around feasts. Last year between midnight and one o’clock around a dozen stellar masses fell our way, etched fleeting white lines.

  Ken comes from Australia each year for a month and studies ostracods under a microscope. He’s excited about V. and Paolo’s work on ratios of genetic variation that can’t be explained without assuming that males somewhere or at some time played a part. At dinner at our house, he always offers a few unnoticed angles on things. Yesterday he dropped a sweet bombshell. He said, “
I love Parma for its nightingales.”

  In June, the month he stays, he hears them soon after three o’clock in the morning. He smiled, “It’s as Keats says, a dark liquid sound of ecstasy. I come back each year nearly just for that. They sing for about twenty minutes. It is an unearthly beauty.”

  The recollection illuminates Ken’s eyes. I feel pulled to a specific focus of surprise. The usignolo. Discovery, particularly this gentle kind, nudges open experience; without any prices to pay, it rejoins: Not a page. You’ll never exhaust even a page of the world. The song of “that immortal bird,” which has lived in my mind as an English poem, has a chance of taking form in Parma. Peach and nightingale. One image goes no further than itself (“ripeness is all”), and the other, with life in its veins, warbles a song of haunting mystery that I never knew unfolded here.

  Ken, a thin, bald man with blue eyes the color of fading chicory, grew up in Poona, India. He enjoys telling stories. His boyish smile puckers with thought. As a youth, Ken saw Gandhi sitting at his spinning wheel, in a simple courtyard down the street from his house. He had been invited to meet him. “He was just like his pictures. He sat cross-legged, spinning flax that afternoon. I was quite surprised that he recited the Beatitudes and some verses from the New Testament.” Ken’s father was the officer in charge of the British police in Poona, in the years Indians began to mass for their independence. It was Ken who explained reading the Riot Act to me. It had been used by the British in countless situations to quell union activity, smother popular uprisings, often with ruthless force. But it had the slightly perverse appearance of reasonableness. His father read it judiciously to ever-growing crowds. The Victorian appeal to order ticked like a bomb that eventually would go off.