On my walk this morning, I looked at the sun-bathed city. I need to see the sky and the drift of changing shapes. After two weeks of sodden rain, a little script of May is being written on the Parma yellows and greens.
Craxi is refusing to come back into the country to testify about his part in tangentopoli. Here, James, is a knotty problem of translation. Has the internal émigré moved? Please speak after the beep. Calling, you’d have told me what they’d said on CNN. You’d have asked me to send the Xeroxed review of Amy Clampitt that I’m going to make this morning. Although she was not one of your favorite poets, we would have talked about what was good in her work and where you found it distant and intellectual. We would have chatted about the family, and then you and I would have gone back to being readers. I have no one like you to share reading with. Not here in Italy or anywhere, really. Mandelstam said all he had to do was tell the books he had read and his biography was done. You had that as a measure, didn’t you, James?
Pietro came down unexpectedly last night. He settled in the American rocker and was willing to stay for dinner. He and I tiptoe around politics. He favors politicians who seem hopelessly on the right. It’s difficult for me to know what to talk about. The present, in general, doesn’t seem to exist between us. He can be quite happy, though, dropping into the past. He leans back. Yes. It will be the past. The conversation takes off. Pietro’s sensitivity creeps out of its shell and he begins venturing—like the unimaginable climbs he makes with ropes and picks—into space.
He laughs in a high way—almost like a donkey neighing. It’s half a laugh and half a strategy he uses to cope with the extremes that make up his experience of life. As he accepts a piece of salami, he leaps onto the topic of Nonna Rosalia—Alba’s mother. He laughs excitedly. Pietro sees her differently than Paolo. Rosalia loved Pietro best.
He looks at me. He gives Clare a caress. The world of family starts again. It is utterly unlike anything I ever imagined I would be a part of.
“You know about Venetian blinds—those slatted structures to regulate the light? Rosalia always kept them down, but with little cracks to spy through. She studied every move in the village from behind one that looked out into the square. As a child—who always jumped out of the bathroom window, running away from home—I remember her best as a talking window. She always saw me, and from nowhere an incriminating voice shot through the closed shutters. ‘Pietro, Pietro, you rascal, you brat. I see you in the square. Come in this minute. Do you hear me? You are not to be out there. Come in.’
“She believed in black magic. When there was a thunderstorm, she’d get her relics in the middle of the room and get down on her knees and pray. ‘Santa Barbara / Sant’ Simon / keep the lightning from killing me in one blow.’ ”
Paolo is warming up. Clare seems transfixed. Paolo opens up a bottle of wine and says, “It was our father’s favorite. Albana.”
“Really?” says Pietro. He drinks a glass. “It’s good.” He takes another sip. “It’s hard to face, but I can’t pretend. Papa was not a Demochristian. Ruffino told me, too; Papa was a Liberal.”
“Do you like the wine?”
“I already told you it’s good.” Pietro doesn’t like being interrupted. Like a Ferrari just reaching its running speed, he shifts upward. But Paolo is quick.
“Who were Santa Barbara and Sant’ Simon, anyway? Bogus saints unsanctioned by the church,” he interjects, answering his own question.
“They didn’t hurt anything,” Pietro says, defending Rosalia and tapping Clare to make sure she’s listening. “Nonna Rosalia and I always met head-on. It was better that way. You—Paolo—you just criticized her.” Pietro laughs loudly. This time it’s nearly a cackle. “She would beat me with a broom when she could catch me, but after that it was pari, pari—tit for tat. I would get the other end of the stick and pull it as hard as I could. We’d struggle and then—bat-ta-bang—I’d let go. Poverina. Once I dressed up like a ghost; I half knew she really believed in those things. She was sitting in her bed. Seeing the white, walking sheet coming toward her, she started to scream. She clutched at her heart, ran into the kitchen, and came back with two knives. She stabbed, trying to get me. I kept my ghost voice up and slipped out the door. Shaken, unsure if it was really me, she wrapped her head in a towel and went to bed. She had a knife in each hand.”
Paolo said, “I was four years younger, but I remember it like yesterday. I knew you were under the bedsheet, but she didn’t. She was so clumsy I was afraid she’d kill you.”
“You started to cry,” Pietro said. He laughed and went on, happy with the memories that had come alive.
“Then there was Nonna Nice. She was awful—with that roving eye slightly off-center and those lips that you didn’t want to graze your cheek. You never had to spend the night with her. But I did. Mamma was right to make us know her—our father’s stepmother. But she was horrendous. We were just used by her, when she came in the summer. She would cough in the night and call me. I was fourteen. ‘Pietro, Pietro.’ That eye would be rolling in her head, and she’d be coughing and crying out for medicine. For a good drink of spirits. With those awful lips. I could fake it. I could be kind, but she was frightening. It was a lot to help an old lady like that. You never knew, really, if that horrible coughing sound might be her last.
“Nonna Rosalia, on the other hand, I cared for. She, too, had her crisi—day and night. Her heart. She couldn’t breathe. She needed a scoop of cherries soaked in brandy. She had a great palate. Do you remember how in Castelnovo in those early years Mama rented out our rooms and we crammed into Rosalia’s rooms in the summer?”
“They were horrible,” Paolo said. “Her rooms.”
“You’re wrong,” Pietro said. “They had a nice cotto floor. Good light coming in the windows. It was the renters who had complications. One didn’t get a kitchen, the other a bath, but so what? Remember that woman who set fire to the curtains? She’d had a story with a priest. She’d been sent to the mountains, through the church’s network, to get her life back together. Mamma was picked as the person to give her shelter for free. She fell asleep smoking and burned up the only special thing in the room: the heavy curtains Rosalia loved.”
“What’s your first memory, Pietro?” I ask.
“I don’t know for certain. I think a tree trunk—large, solid. I remember leaning against it. Otherwise, but I don’t know if it’s really mine, I remember being brought home from a farmer’s house where Angela and I had slept. We had scabies. My poor mother rushed us into the bath, while trying not to criticize the farmers. I remember seeing the fixtures for turning on the water and screaming with fear. I never, even as a small child, was one for a civilized, confining way to live.”
When Pietro leaves, we’re all in a good mood.
Bodoni’s fame was such that the dukes hired him to run a ducal printshop and allowed him to have private business
[23]
PALATINA LIBRARY
Most state-run offices have an ambiguity about them. Overriding the dull paint, the halfhearted cleaning, the anonymous furniture, the impossibly short hours is the implicit fact that someone else is responsible. The overseer may be as far away as Rome. Or a local person who holds power so tyrannically that a request for a simple yes or no will be met by a disdainful insistence that one return in fifteen days. A discouraged torpor, like the carbon paper exhausted of its color that is used to duplicate and triplicate forms, abounds. By the fourth copy down there is only the faint pressure of a hand. In the Parma post office, on the days when the clerks stare out like prisoners behind their glass cages, it can happen that they ask you, the customer, to go to a tobacco shop and procure stamps for them. There are lots of padded, defended survivors in these difficult, unopened chains of command.
Dr. J. offered me three afternoons of his time to see the state library in Parma, the Palatina, housed inside the enormous Farnese Palace, along with the archaeological museum, the Pinoteca Museum, the Farnese Theater—one of th
e wonders of Parma—and the various institutes, one of which works around the marble watering troughs for the dukes’ horses still embedded in the walls. The size of the Farnese Palace, which remained unfinished, never ceases to impress: the power, the costs, the gulf and shadows it cast on this small dukedom can be felt in the considerable reach it takes to climb the steps to the library, giant steps that only bring one to the first floor. The University of Parma, which bought the land in the 1960s for its science campus outside the city and moved there in 1987, never envisioned a library in its elaborate ambitions. In fact, it has no structure called a general library. Building a place for the intensive circulation of books and devising ways to expand their uses runs counter to the culture.
For me, from experience, free access to information is fundamental and expresses itself in the existence of a library. Freedom of the press based on facts depends on the assumption that facts can be found, checked, counterchecked, touched and that information is seen as a public good, a democratic necessity. This belief is fed in part by libraries that offer far more than theoretical or specialized texts. Variety, multiple cultures, like odd-fitting parts of a self that turn into a real person, is requisite, as are courtesy, a sense of adventure, a belief that one can always be an autodidact.
Some university departments in Parma have small specialized holdings, but these, too, are usually under lock and key. The idea of reading is restricted and focused. Freedom, fact checking, eclectic browsing, home use—these values don’t come to mind as a necessity even at institutions created for learning. They are not at its heart and a guarantee. The open hours of public offices have been devised by bureaucratic misers, mired in precedent and federal rules. Parmigiani with a sense of suffocated rebellion will tell you that not having libraries is a question of mentalità. You can’t expect to change attitude.
All over Italy in recent years, people have been using information which was not freely available in rigid or impoverished libraries, with their inertia and often repressive mentalità. Via the Internet, information can be served up in a matter of minutes. A student of Paolo’s told me that the Internet is “too beautiful and even dangerous.” Why? “Because you don’t feel like getting off. It helps you. It gives you things you can’t find in the reality around you. People answer your questions.” E-mail parks on screens in Parma houses, too. It tells users in a much more random and still to be understood way—as Rilke once told poetry readers from the realm of art—that they must change their lives. Its authority disrupts.
“Does anyone working in the Palatina believe that the library makes a difference in people’s lives? Do libraries nurture hope and foster a restlessness, an attitude of looking for something? Do they encourage people to go to the bottom of things and help them with facts? Are they democratic?” My questions make the official of the Palatina stare at me, his eyes dilating wider and wider. (There are other libraries in Parma, but the Palatina has the largest holdings and represents the evolution of a library here.) He gives me a wan smile. Haven’t I seen the four-meter-high ladders that are built like platforms to shoot movies? Am I so ignorant that I don’t realize that many of the books are centuries old? Am I unaware that the staff is paid a pittance and all are employed for life?
“I know nothing about American libraries,” he said. I am sitting on the other side of his wide desk. “If I have to be honest I would say that American culture frightens and repels me. It is materialistic and pragmatic.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “What do you understand public to mean? Is culture language?” I blurted, and in the same breath, “Do you know English?”
“Niente,” he said sadly. “I speak and read French and I’m attracted by Europe and its ideas. America, quite frankly, terrifies me.”
My memory of American libraries—how they remain open on campuses even at night, how they work in villages and suburbs, drawing on the larger municipal sources—is of efficiency, excitement, and open-mindedness. “They’re great,” I say. “And on the whole, an important institution in a democracy. Even if the Internet and computers push books into a different medium, I think American libraries’ concerns in the past have been an important social element lending support for equality and hope. They have made information accessible, diffusing it beyond the boundaries of class and privilege. And they foster a self-reliance.”
The specific sounds of American libraries—hush stirred by the hum of low voices and steady streams of feet, on carpet, on wood, on linoleum, phones ringing at the information desks—are sounds of use. I remember the personal feeling of entitlement to browse and to say I wish to discover as well as to specialize and focus. I remember the right to enter the stacks and wander along shelves of minds and vistas in any direction. I remember the whopping, serious fines. The underlying assumption of the American library is its importance in building a democratic and creative society based on free access to information and culture. Its depth, its eclecticism, its concentrations of knowledge are organized to be used. Libraries have accumulated unquantifiable amounts of cultural wealth. Their present financial struggle to exist means they must examine their motives and scrutinize how they can improve. I say to him, “They are meant to be used—some even on Sundays. My impression is that libraries are seen as public and private guarantees to acquiring information as a duty and a right, however you want to define the latter.”
“Certainly”—he nodded—“although we don’t have that as our aim.”
For anything I asked, or as relevant material came into his head, he would summon one of three peppy assistants. They entered in an informal rotation. One would perch near his chair until he had issued his request and, in time, would return with photocopies. Two minutes later he might ring again.
Dr. J., like many people in positions of power where time seems idiosyncratically unpressing, loved lecturing. Initially he did not seem that curious. He had the didactic habit of excellent monologuists. He did not think I had anything to exchange. But during our conversations, a sincerity on both our parts broke through his official positions and his considerable knowledge.
I wanted a description of the library as an institution: its aims and scope. He gave it to me as history. Inside of that, he also explained in endless distinctions how history is always an interpretation.
The library that as a root gave place to the Palatina Library arose in the sixteenth century, cultivated by the Farnese family. They collected books. Don Carlo, who became Carlos III of Spain, took the collections with him when he transferred from Parma to the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Many paintings were taken from the palace by Napoleon, but no books. It was the Bourbon Don Filippo who set up the Palatina Library in 1761, for “public use.” The concept enlightened the city. Until recently, the definition of “use by the people” was confined to the educated classes.
It was under the Bourbon dynasty that the famous Bodoni typeface was created. Acquiring sets and examples of its 150 characters was one of the coveted projects of Angelo Pezzana, who served the library under various administrations. He, like some of his predecessors, had responsibilities that often extended to funding. He deftly transferred the budget of the library to the state, as the Hapsburgs rewrote the civil law for the city, under Maria Luigia, following a period when Napoleon had annexed the city, and its budget for twelve years had come from city coffers. Originally, under Don Filippo and Don Ferdinando, the court paid the bills. A budget was introduced for the first time in 1785. Pezzana knew that unless he got the funding written into the state statutes under Maria Luigia this great treasure and resource would be lost or reduced in effectiveness.
As I listened to Dr. J., I was struck by the complexity of the history of this single institution. It was not a single institution, but had passed through the governances of many powers, not only different administrations but different cultures: different languages and laws, as well as an evolving concept of separation of dynasty and state. The library had survived and had always had to depend in
part on the favor of those in power—until Italy became unified; then the budget was taken over by the state. Reading Pezzana’s farsighted plan to acquire the Bodoni typeface, it is easy to feel how servile his words are, how humble he has had to become in order to get his desires across to the people who have power to wreck his plans. Not only did he acquire the typeface, but large purchases of books and prints took place. Pezzana managed to acquire superb manuscripts and codices, including some in Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Syrian, Armenian, Russian, Chinese.
Dr. J. launched into Bodoni’s story. The facts on this and many other local topics flowed like scrolled texts.
While Dr. J. spoke, he fingered a paperback on five centuries of print. He held the book, rubbed it fondly and with reverence. “If man needs it, he will move on to disks and computers for carrying his thoughts and words. Books, too, were technologies that came into being at a certain point. They followed clay tablets, stone, bronze slates, skins. But the book after Gutenberg slowly became a personal possession. For that reason I think the book will never disappear completely. It is too much like us. It needs to be held and lived with. It consists almost of memory. We need to touch some words, possess them, over and over. The margins in books have a life all their own. People write things there. They confess, react, leave ant trails or camouflage. Sometimes they just leave an assent or an emphatic ‘no.’
“Following Gutenberg’s invention, itinerant printers began to develop. Type was expensive, cast by goldsmiths. Men traveled from city to city and would loan their services to people who needed public notices or books. Bodoni, who was born in Genoa in 1740, eventually worked in the Vatican type shops—in the missionary section, where he learned to set type in other languages, Hebrew among them. He saw Chinese texts and Arabic. These visual languages with their characters and arabesques increased his knowledge of letters.
Mother Tongue Page 27