Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  The ants show us our ridiculous passivity. How abstracted we are from even a bit of garden nature. Our focus, all focuses, are a matter of selected limits. As static or nervousness the ants add a texture, sketch out actual realms without us and with us—biological and domestic. So much that needs attention waits, suspended, as long as this chronicling goes on. Writing, this pursuit of an inward voyage in words, is a very different obsession from living.

  I want to finish my book. It has overtaken me. I coexist with it. I am no longer completely living my own life, inside my own immense quiet. I am inside this pulling out and putting into language topics worthy of being considered; anyone forced to lay out her life by looking back would have moments of breaking down. Sometimes, now, the discrepancies seem like oceans. I am nearly in danger of inching out too far. Public and private are delicate, for a micro-searcher. Words do not rescue me.

  I have ideas about the borders of the narrative, borders in time. Inside of those, like the insects, storms and multiplications, forces of life, take place and appear, grappling and turning. I cannot write about life without writing what life is about. Emerson said, “This onward trick of nature is too strong for us. Però si muove.”

  Però si muove. Nevertheless, it does move. He was quoting Galileo, and somehow slightly changed the text; the eppur to però. Galileo supposedly uttered that painful sentence after he recanted his discovery. He signed a confession disavowing that the earth moves, but then he added, “Nevertheless, it [the earth] does move.”

  Però si muove. How frightening and heavy, experimental and thrilling a burden to know that. When Galileo said it, in blatant contradiction to what he had just signed, he intended to stanch the violence of his forced confession. In the juxtaposition of his contradictory phrase, he knew it would ridicule his interlocutors; implicit was a rational calculation: Regardless of what I write, what you force me to say, this truth is larger than this moment of suppression. What I have proved is nothing you can hide. It will come with or without me, so great is its reality.

  Emerson and Galileo’s meeting in one sentence brings me up short. American English has been the greatest of borrowers. Emerson began his sentence in one place and ended it in another place, another century, another context. America and Florence: a new country and an Italian city. “Nevertheless, it does move.” It could be read a hundred ways. The splice of English and the Italian, of contexts, the differences in the two men and in their philosophies, marries effortlessly and goes on in Emerson’s optimistic spirit. Emerson makes his own point, which proposes newness and the spirit’s climb. I like the creativity of how he helped himself to what he needed. But the sentence the way it was first uttered is a hundred times more poignant.

  The immense power of history lies in the original sentence. What we might want to discover about the real man breeds in that rejoinder. His confidence. His humiliation. His blindness. I will write Galileo’s words on a page. Taken from their great heights, brought down to us, this sentence has been lived, in common but not identically. Place and time give it different shades of meaning.

  Però si muove, Però si muove, Però si muove, Però si muove

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Brazilian journalist, 1995

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Galileo, 1633

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Ecclesiastes

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Mary Ann Evans, 19th century

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Hungary, 1956

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Buchenwald, 1945

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Ginger Rogers, 1940

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Heraclitus, 6th century B.C.

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Basho, 17th century

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Benin sculptor, 3rd century

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Shakespeare, 16th century

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Montezuma, 15th century

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, American passenger pigeon, 19th century

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Tyrannosaurus rex, Cretaceous period

  Nevertheless, the earth does move, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 18th century

  [20]

  N.

  I wanted no more heaviness in this story. No more death and undoing. One scream is enough. But it has come back to write itself into this story of Parma. Clare said to me, “Don’t worry, there must be a reason that you can’t leave it out. Your readers won’t flinch.” I put it in because in memoirs real events shape the life. But ultimately as I told it I could not accept the confinement of description, the sieving of meanings and contexts when talking about the woman I am about to describe. It was too private, and in the end what I write is taken from my mind, a few pages of words, about a breathing red-cheeked woman, who loved life and fought to live.

  Like Dante, when he turns upside down to leave hell and get on with his journey into purgatory, I had to leave behind the passivity of translation. I had to stop reading a life from someone else’s point of view. The portrait, as I wish to deepen it, assumes its own dignity and extreme sufferance. My point in telling it diverges. Like Galileo and Emerson, I remain caught mid-sentence, and her life, like Galileo’s discovery, spun on larger and more important, irrefutable, unlike my words.

  In dealing with the fabric of time and its meaning, one of the most difficult choices for women writers is that of whether to pull toward big ideas, those explored for centuries in books, or to stay tightly focused on an ego-driven voice, or to represent the truth of a woman’s life, which is often coping, complexity, and a sharp sense of life’s blood. It is life’s blood, its preciousness, that perhaps can be reelaborated, by telling the stories of every day.

  Just her name, and I feel the terrible mystery. N. is forty-six years old and was born in the countryside outside Parma. Her daughter is Clare’s best friend. For eight months, she has been fighting a cancer in both lungs, and since Christmas it has metastasized into her legs, hips, and spine. First she limped. Then she used a crutch, and now when she can pull her young harrowed body up, she walks using two. She drags herself from the bed, to the hall, to the bathroom, and back to bed. As I walk behind her, she asks me to be ready to catch her short body if she falls. A year ago she was another person. It is not her slippers or robe, but the pain in her back, the hump of her shoulders, the cost of each step that make her look like a drawing of a beggar, a sketch done by Rembrandt or Daumier. We have been friends, mothers together. We have stood at bus stops waiting for our girls. We have exchanged messages in times when they were growing apart. We have held our breaths, wishing our two daughters well. We seldom shared our hopes for ourselves, because our lives were objectively different. Mine had sparks of travel, of people from other places, talk of dreams and music, and in the end, I didn’t talk much about it, so there would be no feeling of distance. N.’s life was fixed to remain a single arc.

  A photo of N. in her twenties, when she looked like a type, a movie star like Glenda Jackson, hangs above her bed. Above her photo is one of her daughter, G., pensive at age three. There is no shot of her husband, B., probably because he takes all the photos.

  N.’s eyes are balanced and move from fire to sorrow. She is still the picture of life, and often fury. She has a strong body. She is not tall. She has balanced eyes, pointed, glowing, and intelligent. Her mouth is wide, her nose regular. She has run her family, doing the finances, cooking, cleaning, sewing their clothes, listening to them, making suggestions. She has helped others. She nursed her husband’s mother and father, both of whom died of cancer. She nursed her own mother and father through their deaths. Her life is in some ways a monochrome litany of deeds, help, work. She assisted a cousin, physically and psychologically, when her daughter died of cancer. She looked after an aunt. Even a few months ago, she was still helping a Polish woman who lived in their building. The woman is fifty-eight. She has a Red Cross passport, having left Poland as a political exi
le. She was a rebel sentenced to jail for resisting the regime when she was a student. Recently, she fell and broke her leg. The woman is alone in the world. If she went back to Gdansk she would be too old to find work. In Parma she types letters, draws up bills. N. drove her to the hospital each day, and in those weeks, even while she was having chemotherapy herself, N. revived in her old role of helper. She felt her normal self, sharpshooting against slights and injustices, the selfishness of so many people. She didn’t mind gossiping a little. She wasn’t a prude. She loved making judgments on a deed and asking for concurrence.

  N. never told me how far she went in school. One of her aunts told me that this well-informed woman completed the eighth grade. N. often threw down the sentence “I’m just a simple person” before making her analysis. It was common in Parma in the 1950s, for reasons of money or of perception of girls or of class, to go no further. A few months ago when N. was walking, driving the Polish woman, and reacting well to her chemotherapy, I urged her to take some brief trips. The doctor, too, had told her that. She had never seen the hills of Rome. She had never felt the spray leaning over a vaporetto in Venice. She knew from books the cycle that had been painted in the School of San Rocco, in which chapel in St. Peter’s the Pietà rested, but she had put a stop to such forward plans. “When I get well, I’ll go. When I am really well again, we’ll go, the three of us, and it will be like it always was.” She looked dubiously at me. “Why not go now,” I prodded. She stared at me as if I were an idiot. “When I get well,” she said firmly. I felt humbled. Not useless completely, but a burden swept underfoot.

  One afternoon, N. is discouraged, weepy, certain she is sicker than she can admit. I try to think of some way to distract her, while giving her an image to work with. It comes into my mind to ask her to draw a circle. “Now place yourself in it,” I say. “Imagine yourself and do anything you want to the circle.” She places a small dot down near the bottom of the right side. “That’s me. I know it’s a problem. I’ve never been in the center, always off to the side. I never wanted it or knew it. I was happy just being the head of the family.” “Try,” I say, “to put yourself in.” “I can’t,” she says flatly. “Try,” I say again. We struggle as if we are pulling strings of shyness, inhibition, and fear. N. suddenly draws a little stick figure nearer the center. “I feel better,” she says. “Try taking it further. What color dress would you like?” The feeling of letting in a ray of color makes her stop. “I can’t,” she says, folding the paper in half. “I’m too angry,” she says bravely. “I just am.” In the following weeks, she refuses what she considers fantasy: thinking about her life. I begin to wonder why I am going at all.

  A month ago, self-diagnosed after officially having had an infection and never cancer, N. let go. It seemed for a while that her life would assume a Greek form. She announced that she knew she would die. “Why?” she kept asking. She talked to herself, crying out loud. “No. No. No. No.”

  Now she was having none of that. She was in great pain. Her blue robe, an ice blue, and her pajamas with two songbirds covered her, and she was saying, “I’m not going to get well. You know that, don’t you?” I came in on them, her and her husband, and the great silence around this terrible truth had been punctured by her own strength. She was almost euphoric. Then she darkened, in a sudden switching. She said, “I have told my daughter. I have told her that life is not beautiful, and that many awful things happen in life. One is about to happen. Oh, help me to be a protagonist.”

  She took my hand in her soft hands. They burned. I thought she must have felt my heart pounding like a wren’s. We whispered and cried. For me, inside of the terror of the truth, there was also relief and, I hoped, some space to work in. “Will you,” she pleaded softly, “take some interest in her? How can I leave her? She’s so young. And B., too? Can you take some interest in them? If you think G.’s man when she finds him is not right, will you tell her that? Will you help her some with her school? I won’t be here to help her. If I had known, I would never have married, but I didn’t know, and what’s done is done. I won’t be here to see her children. You must ask her to use the tu form with you. She still calls you signora. I hope you don’t mind. But you can’t make her use the Lei form if she is to grow close to you.” Imagining what N. felt admitting to herself that there would come a point when she would never see her child’s face again was so personal and so unfair that I closed my eyes to avoid hers and then I thought: Why? Tears were a relief.

  Complicit was a word she had used about her relationship to her husband. N. loved being complicit with him. He is holding her feet, dressed in white sport socks. He is rubbing them lightly. She is lying on the couch on pillows and grimacing in pain. She has learned to give herself shots, because it is too hard for him.

  Her face is glowing and her voice is a rasp. “Nothing works anymore. I hate my spine. It feels like broken glass.” And then she weeps. Her husband goes close to her and they hold each other. Then a cramp in his back makes him stand. She tells him to go back to holding her feet.

  Her brother is there. He is her only brother and he cheated her out of an inheritance. She confronted him directly. She questioned her mother, who had agreed in secret to the plan. Neither had any explanation. She was simply cut out. Many women here complain about the favoritism of mothers for their sons. N. had been good to her mother and continued to be good. She looked after her in her final illness, but the injustice was never straightened out. Now the brother is grief-stricken. “I was always jealous of your husband,” he tells his sister, as he lies down next to her on the couch.

  We are sitting together in the living room. The warm summer air is coming in. The wind is slightly agitating. N. is smiling. She is talking about herself. “Childhood,” she says, “is better than anything later on.” Yet Italian childhood is often the most mythical part of existence. In my writing class, childhoods appeared as harsh, dull, duty-bound, with little room, for self-expression. Many of the middle-class women were sent away for years or summers to strict, loveless Catholic boarding schools or harsh, indifferent relatives; most endured repressive loneliness. There was often little conversation and little space for the women to express feelings. Many men in Paolo’s institute did their schooling after getting up at three to work at farm tasks like plowing. I’ve heard quite a few versions of the slobber and drool of the cows when one walked behind the plow. If not harshness, simple lack of personal talk, studying by the light of coal-burning lamps or candles, and a strong sense of surveillance and authority seem quite common. Beatings, down to the bloody bone, are described and shrugged off, often with a strong sense of independence. The poor parent—he was a violento.

  Instead of rage some of the women dwell on the magic, dreamlike quality of childhood. The empty boxes of presents put under a tree for Christmas in a Communist home where Christmas could not be celebrated. The child simply unwrapped emptiness, and found it beautiful. Another woman I know received a doll each year on her birthday; each year she carefully lifted the same doll from the tissue paper and played with it for two weeks. Then it disappeared for another year. N.’s stories are like that.

  A man we know sees his childhood as underlying his political formation. The boy, whose grandmother had him secretly baptized, under his Communist parents’ noses, felt articulated, consciously painful feelings of conflict. How he sweated and felt humiliated when the old woman dragged him out to have his head patted by the priest. How he hated the forced obedience. He had already decided against the church, its corruption and limits on liberty. He felt impotent anger as the old woman slipped precious fresh eggs into the priest’s greedy hands as compensation for his blessing. He took up Communism as an ideology that he would explore and elaborate, contest and yet obey, as he lived a difficult life as a Communist intellectual and champion of the poor.

  I see, reader, that every time I put in my voice, I shirr and pucker the smooth way we could read N.’s story. I want to tell it because she should not be forgott
en, but I also want to make it porous, to introduce a tension. I do not know if I am right, but I could not tell this story the way it is without explaining a tension that began building in me. I felt it as a need to do something. I realized, though, that there was nothing to do. But I know she wanted to change. I began to resent the repression and suffocation.

  N.’s stories are full of the energy she possesses, in spite of her description of herself as an inconcludente—a person with few achievements and little direction. It is easy to picture her as the tomboy she describes. “I loved watching the sun come up. I used to rise at four and creep into my father’s room. He would let me climb on a chair and open the shutters. I liked to watch it come, the light, the pinks. When the sun was up, I would go into my brother’s room and open his shutters. He hated it. I wanted to see if the sun was different from there, if he got a better view. I was an insistent kid. Outside there was the courtyard and the oven for roasts and bread. We were fourteen cousins.

  “I was strange. I always wondered about things. I’d see an airplane and guess where it went. I saw the moon and somehow transformed it into Parma. I knew Parma was nearby.” Her details give a sense of how shut off the countryside still was from the city in the early 1950s. The Bishop and Conte of Parma, carried in a chair and protected by a billowing canopy, still blessed each car and motorcycle in a ceremony that paraded past the cathedral. “I watched the swifts when they would hatch in the spring and they made me think: Where is Africa? Africa? Now where did I get that idea from?” she asks, recognizing her intelligence and curiosity.