Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  According to the English law enforced in India, under the Riot Act there were three chances for protesters to withdraw. After being asked to disperse before the count of five, once that number had been called out protesters would be struck on the body with batons, called lathis, by two charging lines of balletic constables. After the second call for dispersal, the lathis were set aside, and two lines of men with rifles would fire at the protesters’ legs. Third call, and rifles would be aimed into the crowd—to fire at will and to kill.

  Ken described the color of his father’s ashen face (“a kind of clay color, a gray clay you don’t find around here”) as he sat down late to dinner after having been in a charge where his men had opened fire to disperse students who had been obstructing the railway line. Two had been killed. Ken’s face conveyed that those deaths were still a part of him. Ken took part in many situations where rioting broke out. He fought fires for two hours under a shower of paving stones and bricks from a mob. Two rioters were shot dead on the roof of a local mosque. The riot picked up and went on until more than thirty men and some horses had been killed. Ken left India as a late adolescent. He left its beauties and the complex, manly feelings of being the dominator. The situation no longer belonged to the British. Even though the Riot Act in some instances had been a force to save lives, its time was over.

  Ken recounts stories, as many people who come to dinner at our house do. Very few visit because there was an obligation to invite them. The stories that come out are thick with life, like honey spread on bread or a pair of old weathered boots, or eyes that have decided something after seeing the dark light spelunked from the bottom of a cave. Politics reach intense and often inconclusive pitches, but nearly all of the personal stories have already distilled a meaning. People from many countries come and go, leaving definite pieces of themselves: Pushkin recited in Russian, with Italian read over it; the story of a man’s best friend who married a woman who, as a five-year-old in Bergen-Belsen, was comforted at night by Anne Frank; or a man recalling his own feelings of fright and awe when, as a ten-year-old boy, he took a nine-hour ride on the back of a mule carrying a thousand pounds of flour to partisans in hiding; stories of environmentalists living with death threats come out as reminders of the costs of resistance. Stories from Americans are often more professional: a building can be built, a program written and funded, an orderly sense that jobs consume and fulfill. In recent years, conversation may center on how language in the United States became political.

  Ken was at our house for some advice on translation. He was working on a book of poems—Tra Terra e Cielo—that he had taken from a pile of free books an Australian politician had gathered up on a visit to Veneto, lugged back to Australia, and left on a table. Paolo often does this with our magazines, The New Yorker, Scientific American, The Nation, National Geographic, The Southwest Review, The New York Review of Books. They disappear from his desk at the university before nightfall. Who knows where they travel?

  Ken had taken a book of the poetry of Carducci, which he found hard going, and Franco Berton’s slim volume of contemporary poems. Their literary economy and the love relationship of the poet to his wife spoke to him. In Wagga Wagga, Australia, he decided to pull Berton into English. Or as he said: “The poems compelled me to do so.”

  Now in the peach heat of June, as the shutters are pulled down for shade, we play with the words. There will not be enough time to go to the bottom of many of the translations. We will consider some passages that aren’t working. Righting one word often shines light on all the blurs and opacities. When it’s been discovered you can feel the harmonious interconnections. The conscious and intuitive choices become coherent and the poem assumes a body. Sometimes the word is clear enough. It’s a matter of choosing its tone or shade. Those tasks are light, subjective flips of the coin. In one poem about greens in rain, Berton employs anima—the “spirit” of turquoise or the “soul” of turquoise—that suffuses all rain. “Soul” is softer and more pensive, we decide. It’s the preposition that then changes things. Is it “the soul / of turquoise” or “the soul / turquoise”?

  There is a poem about a mother in which the lines make sharp horizontal jumps like walks off cliffs. Each is a leap, but there is no free fall. The lines remain as suspensions. Cancer is a flower budding. The poet’s mother dies. There is a sparrow’s heart beating. The poem about his mother’s death turns into memory and is a conscious field, in the present, and the reader does not know if he is inside or outside the poet’s mind. The reader is inside words.

  I feel invigorated and revived seeing the brief, concentrated forms and wonderful flights and connections. Prose is so different. One is always remembering the reader, holding her hand, and making her see and accept, coaxing her to turn the page. Prose is a worry about pace and an agony in terms of representation. When one writes in the first person the narrowing of focus is in competition with giving white free space to all that can’t be there. In poetry ten lines can penetrate existence. There are words, silence, and images of things.

  Prose without some sort of ethics, some ground that explains some of the mind’s way of selecting, can’t ever find an authority. Prose, of course, is never existence. Writing about life as nonfiction, though, is determined in part by what really happened, what fell across a life, and how and where there was consciousness. Making the focus of being a woman felt and seen is another pressure that is forced if it is always the center. Perhaps prose begins to be expressive when most of what surrounds the reality feels as if it is there subliminally. Experience and knowledge, having been selected not to appear, reside in the authority of the construction. They play invisible parts.

  Angela, Paolo’s sister, drops into the afternoon’s abundance. She never sits down. In two sentences she throws out the fact that the Greeks had no verb for translation. The verb for the process meant to interpret. That changed all history, starting from taking the Bible from Hebrew into Greek. Then she’s gone; the idea she has seeded could take a year of thinking and research before its effects could be understood. I wish she had sat down.

  Anita, an ironic, gentle American who has lived twenty-seven years of her marriage in Parma, comes over for tea and digs into the words as if she were carrying wet sand to the walls of the sand castle. Her face turns bright with excitement. “No, I think, you’d have to say that a word like abbacchiato can’t mean blinded. As far as I know, it would have to pick up the basic meaning—dispirited.” A bottle of carbonated mineral water explodes in the heat and none of us is hurt by the shatter of green glass and foam. The book has been christened.

  How interesting that the gifted and forgotten Berton is going to be read in Australia. It is nearly impossible to be published. Finding a translator more improbable still. And then, as is so often the case, destiny arrives as a gift of empathic response from the right person. So much poetry is kept alive by the passions of editors who see poetry as the measure (as De Gasperi said of Italy’s old people and children) of a country’s civilization, or by people who carry the scraps from prisons, or memorize passages and recite them when in need of peace.

  Berton’s love poems intermix mother and wife. Ken doesn’t think it’s literal. “At least I hope not,” he says with a pricklishly raised eyebrow. Anita and I think that Berton accepts the projection and means just that. We look at the line together, and Anita and I agree on the reality and weights of that assumption from our years of having lived in Italy. There is something nearly inescapable in the admission. “Deep within me / I desired you / and to call you mother.”

  It seems obvious to Anita and me that Berton is not asking his partner to be the mother of his children, but is addressing her in all her terrifying power to envelop him. Ken says, “It’s pretty strong stuff.” “You bet,” I say, certain that it remains central to understanding Italy’s social fabric.

  Translating Berton’s lyrical, shining poems, Ken and Anita and I found peaches and fruits swelling here and there. The Italian language is
full of nectars, waters, and juice, even when the words are stones and steel. Words like womb, or Ken’s choice, venter, are rarely used in twentieth-century English love poetry, whether written by men or women. The word womb, which seems basic and natural, is nearly unnatural if you place it in Virginia Woolf’s concerns or even Anne Sexton’s. It becomes heavy, cumbersome, unliberated, inhabited by biological destiny. Its creative sense, its metaphorical sense of gestation, is rather puny. Véntre fits in Italian, fits as a place and organ that is deep, hidden, that has physiological and literary and classical powers, tied to woman, wife, consort, lover, mother. Its hold on other and otherness is something that women writers feel also belongs to them. The word donna in Italian comes from the Latin domina: owner, head of the house, adult woman, queen, wife. The word woman comes from Old English and means wife plus man.

  Virginia Woolf asked women to “write about sex.” It was she who led us through the rooms of her own house breaking open its realities. She let the reader into privilege and hierarchy, and showed us confining rules and their violations, the abuses and alliances within a closed space. When I reread Woolf’s Moments of Being I was deeply moved by the sacrifice she made by accepting (surely she must have felt) the possible madness stirred by looking closely and writing it down. She relinquished all options for an easy life. Her justification of her analysis was that it was in the end not a wish to defile and deface but a burning desire to find explanations for power structures which had kept her from entering the world; which had made her defend her mind and place in what was a strictly closed men’s world.

  Woolf’s commitment “to tell the truth” bursts a bubble of envious fantasy about family relationships in elite homes. How much domestic isolated pain and turmoil and how many economic worries go on in the complicated story of Victorian life in the Stephen house. I am overcome by her struggles with a basic form of double language inside emotional, social, and intellectual closed circles. She doesn’t underestimate the difficulty of honesty and telling, but you feel her intellectual power accedes to the task, because she clearly understands only too well her place in its values and its background. The world as she knew it was whole. It represented absolute power at the time she decided to resist it. In its definitions of personal and reality, she was referring to a whole far larger than herself. As a woman, she had to work from truth that was personal, because that truth had not been explained in books. It is nearly a tautology that women in the Anglo-Saxon world began telling personal and domestic stories, trying to understand themselves from an inner view and an outside view that saw them as objects. Men are not expected to talk about their private lives. Women—this compound of wife plus man—feel obliged perhaps to start from the private, the experience they have lived most deeply.

  Last night, I noticed that Woolf had crossed out the observation “my comfortable capitalist head” and substituted “it would not matter to me a single jot” in an essay on working women. Revisions of this sort bring up intriguing questions about writing. The latter was surely a literary choice—to play with the irony of a “feminine brainless” stance. Yet it could also be interpreted differently. In very basic ways in English literature, politics, economics, and religion were considered outside of literary concerns. They belonged to separate spheres that each came with a specialized vocabulary and reference. As well as being unsuitable for reasons of controversy, they also inhabited large, growing bodies of literature of their own, where expertise was appropriate and applied to the real world. Economic growth plus a political emphasis on separation of powers may have been a part of how the English language kept expanding. Capitalism and colonialism pushed English to grow separate branches of language, where, then, the topics generated their own words and context. Occasionally when I meet with the few American translators in Parma, this reality hits home. Given work largely in the technical and economic spheres of English, we are strangers to it and obsolete even in our own language. Technological language has grown to proportions that pertain only to the specialists who operate inside its powers. The language, without connotations, is nonbiodegradable; largely man-made, besides creating our world, it gets bigger without references to languages able to explore its implications.

  In her essay, Woolf’s insouciant substitution establishes a field of aesthetic evenness for her work’s ground. “Capitalist” would sound contentious and also it is broad. Woolf as a writer takes charge of an idea that she is creating in literature and must find a still point free of polemic detail. “A single jot” in its way may be a much more real and pointed statement. It passes an ironic judgment on capitalism by signaling the contradiction that she and her own class enjoy privilege. She may have even invented it. If we take the correction beyond the writer to the person who deliberately crossed out the first sentence and put in the second, who could possibly say if it refers to her real life? We are in the curtain she drew over the world, using her knowledge and aesthetic sense.

  By writing that this summer day is a sensuous peach, I’ve not quite opted for her revision. Like her, I’ve not pursued the grand abstraction, but I have not chosen the crackle of intellect either. My description is triggered by contexts that are the senses and not values. The image is closer to an expressionist painting. The peach comes from a sublanguage, rooted everywhere in independent contexts of seasons and nature that then turn into a surface of sensation inside our minds. There is nothing political about the senses.

  I’ve touched a few sparks of June nights in Parma, a few more realities of the house, language, and difference, and tried to find a scale for drama that in its way has nothing in common with drama. That is the peach. Then there is the nightingale. It sings of having been born and having to die. Darkling I listen.

  And so all that remains is the bed, where many matters of truth find pith. How much needs to be told from the inside of a family? How could we ever convey the scale or the interpretation of the multiplicity of views inside a house? Virginia Woolf, are you the arbiter? Is womb a word in English and does it need a literary path? I want to show you the room and the lying awake around four. That is an hour when I feel I have broken away from marriage and the family and, like the nightingale, I am pouring out my own song, perhaps for the only hour in the entire cycle of a day. There, like Keats, I feel the enormous pull toward a soaring upward. From that tearing intensity, the hour moves forward, back toward the night. I want to show you that here, too, in a house, in a family, these hours of sleep are touching: the way heads rest on pillows, in abandon and trust. Closeness is physical and mute.

  Let me add this. Lovemaking on June and July and August nights in Parma can be sticky and humid. Often it generates wet surfaces around the hips and down the legs and trickles of sweat. In this moment, it comes as a surprise, when our tired skin comes off, the fuzz, the ooze, bruising, warming; our bones start and stop and rest before we become pulpy, gold, golden, picked.

  Eppur Si Muove

  [19]

  EPPUR SI MUOVE

  In a New Yorker that arrived today, there is a profile on Elaine Pagels, a biblical scholar who interpreted gospel material suppressed in the fourth century A.D. on the godhead as multiple and partly female. In the article she mentions that one of her favorite texts from the Bible is found in the Gnostic book of Thomas. This Jesus says, “What we pull out of ourselves will save us. What we don’t pull out of ourselves will kill us.” The magazine is four months late. The Gnostic thought still penetrates like pungent incense.

  Without any prior knowledge of Pagels, outside her scholarship, I begin paging through her life in the magazine. Suddenly I learn that her child dies at age six. A column later her husband falls from a cliff. I’m touched and feel a voyeur. Peering through the long end of a telescope as I go on, I feel tricked, dissatisfied, and either want to go deeper or don’t care at all. Her books are enough. Laying out bare truths about her life is quite a separate issue. Why know about her private life unless we can grasp something of her and her times? I think some
thing like spiritual exercise is necessary on the biographer’s part to catch the interior scatter and establish some basis for meaning. Otherwise how can you put a sense of free space around a subject? I am talking to myself.

  There are insects in the house. They rise like cheerleaders from hell. The flying ants move at precisely eight o’clock at night and the house goes frantic. A detail from the larger world is in our house, battling to conquer ground. Paolo vacuums them, and even puts poison in thin trails outside, but they come. “It’s a natural cycle. A few more days and it will be over. But there are certain ants that, once they are in, even generations later still return. You can’t erase the program. I’ll have to find out about ours.”

  Like timers, after eight, wings grow on their bodies and in waves they take off. They wiggle and breed on the curtains and in the air and then, falling, even sizzle into flame in the halogen lights. McKenzie recognizes them as similar to flies he and his wife cope with. “We leave the outside lights on, and they are drawn out. You could try that,” he says after an hour of watching Paolo try to eliminate them, as they come in faster than he can move.

  This is the second year that the little rutters identically repeat their timed appointment in the yellow study with the tall antique cupboard. We haven’t done anything to solve the problem. They do their mating above and in my book. They drop on my papers and computer, wiggling and crawling, coupling, tumbling down. I crouch under my desk and, at the wall, pull the moldings off. Behind the battiscope—“the fenders protecting against the broom’s sweep”—colonies swarm. A tiny plaster tunnel to the outside lets them in to fly anew. It is so simple and yet something has rendered the solution difficult. The hole still waits to be plugged.