Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  “I liked doing things to see what would happen. I tried riding my bike with my eyes closed and once tumbled down into a ditch with about a half foot of water in it. I was quite crazy. I used to pick open the eggs that I was sent to fetch, and I would do it to see the chicks hatch. One time I went down to see a beehive. I was with two of my cousins. I wanted to know what was in that hive. How was it? What was it that bees did in there? I took a big stick and gave it a poke. They came out in large numbers and stung my cousins all over. I didn’t get a single sting, but I got plenty at home.”

  Many people in Parma remember their childhoods like that, in specific, nearly normal details, days that lift because of some change in the routines and become memorable for that. Very often the dreams for a life stop and abdication of choosing and wanting pushes in. Remembered details take on a kind of Zen beauty. B. asks her if she recalls the eclipse of the sun in 1971.

  For a week or ten days, N. speaks about cancer, and the fact that there is no hope. She begins praying for miracles, accepts prayers, blessed medals, special medicines coming from Lourdes. “But there won’t be a miracle,” she says, “because I don’t want it enough. My head is too weak for a miracle. I don’t go deeply enough. I don’t find faith. I dread and I doubt.” “That’s faith,” I say. But she shakes me off. “I am exhausted,” she goes on. “But they need me. They can’t make it without me. For them, I’ll live, even without legs, even in a wheelchair, I’ll live. And then I see that I won’t be here. I won’t,” and she begins to sob.

  The house is full of women, mostly family from her side and her friends. Some do the washing every day. Some iron. Some cook. A cousin tells me that she irons everything, underpants, socks, sheets. She finds a button off of one of B.’s shirts and back it goes. The handkerchiefs are ironed, the napkins. N. from a couch speaks up. The handkerchiefs must be folded as rectangles, the napkins as triangles. Someone is sweeping. Ants have come in from the roses on the terrace. On the stove, lunch is being started. “How much salt do you want?” N. is involved. “A teaspoon. No garlic. The oil that is used for pasta is different from that for salad.” Her skills and the detail and the ease with which the other women help keep the house absolutely in order.

  The women are overwhelmed by the reality of N.’s pain. If N. starts to weep, she is told to pull herself together. What is she saying? She is not going to die. Doesn’t she know that? The cousins gently nudge her and remind her that she’s trying, that there is always hope. What might be a spiritual exercise turns repressive. Her situation is covered up. Recovery is the only word allowed—as if it is the only hope in life. All efforts to survive in the poverty of the trial are turned away from its truths. I think to myself I understand and respect the urge to fight. She is so young. But then she must have real tools. What she is doing is banging her head against a wall.

  Dostoevsky said that if he had to choose between Christ and Truth, he would choose Christ. N. begins to break down under the sense that she will die. She telephones her doctor and asks if she really knows that cancer has metastasized in the bone? Have they really done a biopsy? The doctor tells N. that she is perceptive and right. They don’t really know. They think it is a tumor, but perhaps, as she has suggested, it really is an arthritis aggravated by a severe lack of calcium. N. is radiant getting off the phone. “I’ll make it,” she says, “I have to make it. The doctor has told me that I don’t have cancer. Do you understand me? I’ll get well.” She likes the story so much better than the one that rendered her helpless. “Really,” she says, questioning the look on my face.

  We have started into another kind of double language. N. is dying. And somehow I am feeling sorry for myself. Besides grief, I am feeling helpless and in exile. I am aware that I must go no further. I have nothing to offer. I must go on with my grass-roots survival. Denial, one of the strongest and most constant mechanisms in Parma, is going to take over the scene, and with its own methods, its own definitions, its own love and caring is going to muck with reality, and make it more desperate, more tragic, more farcical. N. will rise up fighting. I must find footing on my path. Life is subtle and I must pay attention.

  These days of reckoning, hard days of brutal pain, N. refuses pills because she remembers that stage in her parents’ deaths and she doesn’t need them because she is not dying. She doesn’t need pills she feels are carrying her closer to death, a removal from experience, carrying her to sleep, to losing time in this world with her husband and daughter, and yet there is nowhere to rest. There is nowhere to be in her body, no cranny to find solace in, without pain. And besides that, a pounding, horrible feeling of anger and injustice kicks her around. “Why? Why must I go? Why must I leave them?” I know she doesn’t want my words. I have no doors that might work. I am helpless in front of her mortification. Admitting this is very hard.

  Inside the family, N. has opened up the seed. The death is opening itself among them and sinking its frightening roots. N. is opening and gray. She is sobbing and quiet. She is petals, opening and nearly ripped off. And then they drop.

  She is never alone, not for a minute. This is part of the pact. Women are all around her. The family and some friends take up all space and banish the idea, condemn it vehemently, that you are alone and that you are dying. They fill the rooms and the minutes up with life and talk of life. Her husband and daughter, too, stop their daily lives and join their constant attention to her own needs. N. herself refuses to look at a newspaper. “I don’t care anymore.” Sunshine is pointed out. “I have no interest in looking outside. Don’t you realize what I have?” A child comes in and says she’s upset about an exam. N. glares and says, “That’s nothing. You don’t know what’s important. What I have is upsetting.” Then she frowns, shocked. She looks at me. “We have to be egotists in times like this. People have no idea how lucky they are to be well.” Looks pass from face to face and compassion is all around her. She notices it, notices how she was the one who used to offer it. The irony strikes her, pushing her down, when the love was meant to pull her up. Anger that so upsets her cruelly exposes a part of herself that she has never seen, never been, never lived. It is monstrous. A woman who was a secret alive in the marrow of her bones, a simulacrum of potentials, a faceless person with a wish not to die, that woman appears. N.’s daughter begins to dream that she is in a war. In it, bombers fly overhead and she digs a hole, down, down in the living-room floor.

  One of N.’s cousins, Bella, is in the living room. She left school at age eleven, and since her father was already dead and her mother ran a small business, she learned to tend house. She cooked and cleaned. In these days I have seen her make any dish in less than ten minutes. She irons like someone running a race. She is an elegant, small woman whose slightly protruding teeth make her look perhaps sweeter than she is.

  She is saying that she was glad she married late, at age twenty-eight. Another woman who is in the room, fat, kind, and very open about her housewifely lapses, met her husband at age fourteen. And N. is saying to them that her husband represented freedom to her. She got out of the house, out from under the strictness of her parents, whom she dared not even ask to go out on weekends. The cousin, Bella, is remembering her mother-in-law. The tale is a common nightmare. Its confining parameters are entirely predictable. Yet the irrevocable sense of duty is without ways to get out.

  Bella’s husband told her before they married that his mother, since she was a widow, could not be left to live alone. As newlyweds they moved into his mother’s house. The cousin, Bella, found herself in a fierce competition for even the space to put a picture of her brother on the bureau. Her husband gave his cash salary to his mother. The woman kept it in an old leather wallet in her bedroom bureau. When Bella needed a little more than the stipend her husband gave her, she had to ask her husband for permission to beseech his mother for extra money.

  “Her chastising was constant and humiliating. She didn’t like my cooking. When our son was born, she would tear the baby out of my hands.�
�

  I remember feeling with Clare that Alba would do what she considered right. There was no question of listening to what I wanted for Clare. This lack of trust—was it trust?—kept my moves circumscribed. If I left, Alba would throw the whole house upside down, and cleaning, scrubbing, reordering the shelves would be a blitz that Clare was pulled into alongside Paolo.

  Bella, trying to survive a depression, decided to go back to her own mother. But Bella’s mother told her that she must return to live with the mother-in-law. “ ‘She is old and cannot live alone. You must not make your husband choose.’ So I went back. We couldn’t go out. We couldn’t have friends in. Our friends were modern and smoked cigarettes. Once I asked my mother-in-law if my brother could come for the Christmas meal and she said ‘no.’ I had to help her cook, but I never did things right.

  “Last night I was making a dish with fat, full sardines and potatoes, and I thought about my son. He has a girlfriend and I realize I don’t like her. I don’t like her getting the attention he once gave me. For the first time, I can see my mother-in-law’s point. Oh, I tell my son, ‘Don’t sacrifice yourself. Don’t live with her family, and don’t live with ours.’ If it comes down to living away from Parma or living with us, I tell him, he’s better off going. But if something should happen to my husband, I can see how I would want my child to be near. I’m afraid to be alone even for an hour or two. When he goes out, I sleep with my clothes on, ready, if need be, to go to the hospital.”

  The doctor who missed diagnosing the cancer in its early stages is stopping in. N. asked him for more information about her cancer, and he said, “You don’t need any information. I’ll bring you a book of Donald Duck comics.” “I’m dying.” she says to me. “How can I fight with him? I don’t want anything but to return to the way things were a year ago. Before all this.”

  I know what she means by those poignant words. Her little legs in the sport socks no longer work. She can’t sit up. She has forgiven her brother. The priest whom she considered so inept she has forgiven too. “What can I, a poor housewife, do?” There is anger and frustration, but mostly sorrow, lucidity, intelligence, and realism. I hold her hand that is burning like a coal. “I’ll make it,” she says, “I will.” She reads my eyes and stares at me with hatred. There is no divide, and yet there is a great divide between us. “Don’t look at me like that, you scare me.” She wants to be well and nothing else will do.

  In the weeks ahead, N. turns her life ever more fiercely into trying to live. All time is dedicated to a heroic effort to resist. The women explain to me that suicide is the normal response for someone who knows the truth. They cite a boy who hanged himself, a woman who jumped from a window. Neither story surprises me. N. is going to deny death publicly. Everyone around her is going back to that point. I can’t and take a small vow of silence. I don’t want to lie to her. For me it is the only tiny blade of peace that I can offer. I’m back in silence, the unseen and unspoken, the lonely place where I am at one with my cold-seeming, weeping convictions.

  Lavinia Fontana renders wonderful group portraits of generations of women

  [21]

  CLARE

  Last week Clare came into my study and said, “I wouldn’t mind being a duck. They can fly. They have great strength as swimmers, and they walk all right on land. Who, in any of those kingdoms, do they hurt? Ducks are geniuses.” My Lord, I think to myself, she’s bored out of her mind. Today, rising in the dark to take a train back to the university to take a math exam, she is jumpy and cross. “I hate the air here. I am going to live somewhere else permanently.” Two weeks ago, she said, “I used to want to be famous, but since Grandma died I see that immortality is not about fame. I want work that helps people in this life.” This morning she shouted, “Don’t tell me what to do about my friends! They are my friends, not yours!” Before getting on the train, she leaned toward Paolo, “Have you ever realized that Berlusconi’s language is not a parliamentarian’s? He speaks the language of the piazza. That’s what Mussolini did to incite others. I hate Italians who use language in that way.”

  The house now starts into a different Brownian movement when Clare’s cumbersome strawberry-red bag with wheels comes in the door on Friday night. American-made and engineered like a bomb shelter, it is a squeaky emblem of her wish for solidity. The agitation quiets down when she leaves Sunday night. She’s living in Bologna. One hour away. Neither Paolo nor I have absorbed the immeasurable space. The house is a tent that billows out when she enters and sags dully when she leaves. Didn’t we see it coming? In Italy, a child’s leaving is an anomaly and usually doesn’t occur until he or she marries. The American rite of passage seems reckless, raw, leading to tragic mistakes, so friends imply. The child is the center of time in a Parma household. In ours the hands have been snapped from the clock.

  The change is a hard bundle of little bones to pick through. This could be the year of facing once and for all that there is no such thing as getting off the hook. You run through your hurt and the light, the sweetness of the day, and everything is still to come. Birds are not born with their songs. They learn them. They relearn them. We are in for some new songs and with them some heart-fluttering wingbeats.

  Clare is leaving. Nothing a year ago said she would make this move. In less than twelve months, the routines and cornerstones of living in this house are gone. We are caught rather naked and impoverished. But her leaving is the good news, a sign of strength and a future. An era has ended and another begun, abruptly, in such an American way, in our house in Parma.

  The black hole of a daughter’s leaving is a strange combination of hope, liberation, and pain. Redefining a dialogue that, in intuition and intensity, matches nothing else of mine is a process I won’t understand until some years in the future. Reduced or withdrawn are diplomacies that don’t mince words and don’t need words. The ground that was a given, every day and in the house, has been altered. Her presence is now forty-eight hours at a time and the wish to be a part of those hours is very strong. We’ve had ways of making pacts and observations that are the height of closeness and, in recent years, of timid and not so timid battles. Life’s size is an issue of utmost importance for women. She and I see it as enormous, but our visions can get in each other’s way. These last years I have felt pain of hers that I cannot bear. I remind myself of the yellow oxygen masks that pop out in a plane in case of a loss of cabin pressure. Put on yours first and then slip the mask over the face of the child. Rescue is an idea I can hold only for myself.

  Every woman dreams of having a daughter with whom she can share. We have shared more than one can dream and perhaps, if there is such a measure, more than is right. We have walked into spaces of exile, and perhaps too often waited or worried about the other, imagining more helplessness than either of us feels. Every woman learns that a daughter cannot be like her mother until both discover that each is absolutely a different person.

  From the minute Clare was born, I never meant to possess her, but love is a wild force. After the colossal, whalelike coming of birth, emptiness begins as solid and physical. Both times giving birth, I discovered a powerful trinity: body, mind, and other—the child. For some expanding hours, when each minute stretches and goes deeper into a rhythm echoing life, I felt the mystery of three in one, one in three, the power of God in the flesh, as I encompassed, was encompassed and released from birth out of near-annihilation. Of course, it was not smooth or neat. I was sucked down, tossed, torn as the mountainous rhythm found itself. The first birth was thirty hours. I delivered in the dark, in a body that was stripped of strength. I remember the inexperience of my body and the worry for the child, who waited and waited to be born. His sharp nose and intense eyes, his gangling arms and legs gave an immediate sense of the man he would have been. The second time my body knew its moves. The muscles did their exhausting rowing and in four hours, from dawn until just before nine, Clare was born. In the emptiness afterward, the tidal return to a different oneness of the womb and
the mind pulling back from what felt like death, I was handed the child. I could not remember my life as having been without her, wrapped and given to me, the bubbles of spit still on her face. She was grumpy, upset by the bright lights, and then in spite of it all, after a wail, her lower lip trembled and she smiled.

  Paolo is always there to sew on a button, wipe off a spot and a certain kind of tear

  A daughter, by definition, sluices back and forth from oneself. Having been transplanted into another culture where we both felt different might rationally explain our intense sharing. But it was far simpler and didn’t happen over time. Seeing that face with its bubbles and its shock, catching her smile right then, the bond became bottomless.

  Pascal sewed words from a vision into his coat. “Fire” was one of the words the philosopher wrote on a scrap of paper and inserted in his lining. He had felt the fire of God and imagined that he could still forget it, unless he heard its crinkle and read its message. Many of my memories of being a mother are sewn in a lining between myself and the world. One word for mother and daughter would be his: “fire.” Another is “fun.” There are thousands of other loose slips inside, because I don’t want to forget the crinkles of Clare at so many stages. Yet the process of raising her and raising her with Paolo, many of the vulnerabilities, passages, triumphs, and crossings are private and together pack into, now, nearly a coat and lining themselves. I hated the way my mother would “share” any scrap of news, read our letters aloud, and rattle out our successes. I can’t do that to Clare, or to Paolo or myself. There is a core to a child, but there is also lightning change and development. It shouldn’t be any more fixed than snapshots, one tenth of a second, seen through a specific eye and trimmed by a lens.