Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  “He aspired to find patronage to create a set of beautiful type. When he returned to the north, his fame was such that the dukes hired him to run a ducal printshop and allowed him to have private business. In this period Bodoni developed his extremely distinctive, slightly heavy set of characters. His fame spread throughout Western Europe. The carved, slightly oppressive face needed lots of white space, and he became famous for his layouts. In his lifetime his broadsides were unmistakable. Among the works he set was a translation of one of Shakespeare’s plays. It was rejected in Parma and eventually sponsored in the more cosmopolitan Venice.”

  I always found Bodoni type heavy. For me, it cannot take a load of text—a whole novel, for example. I expressed this thought, and Dr. J. stopped. He acted pleasantly relieved.

  “The carved aspect of the type did make it ornate. It did not work well for printing as it rapidly developed and diffused in the early part of the nineteenth century. The political manifestos, the words for less educated people, needed type that was more lively, less labored. Bodoni’s typeface is a dead one. It is too involved with beauty to be read comfortably. It is exhibited and its examples catalogued all over the world, but it is dead. An editor from Parma in this decade, Franco Maria Ricci, uses the fonts, but he is interested in elegance more than written content.”

  His comment on Bodoni was a gust of fresh air, a nice, ordinary confession. What it really was was an honest opinion. Out of Bodoni’s itinerant beginnings, the page bowed under the conventions of the dukes. Dr. J. and I look at an example—a poster announcing an exhibit of Padre nostro, the Lord’s Prayer, written in 68 versions of Asian languages, 114 versions of European ones, 13 versions of African alphabets, and 20 versions of American languages. We compare the print with Palatino. Bodoni is ornamental and static.

  We talk about this feature. Ten minutes later, in his capacity as head of the Bodoni Society, Dr. J. talks enthusiastically on the phone to an organizer for a Bodoni exhibit two years down the line. He wants to get Parma in on the ground floor of an exhibit in another city. There will be books and catalogues of where examples of Bodoni print can be found. His work, the culture, and its little industry will be perpetuated.

  I want to know what the library’s holdings are and how new books work in, so I ask. He tells me, “Sometimes you buy big collections. The largest acquisitions were made under Maria Luigia. Using one fund, forty thousand stampe were acquired. Earlier, before the French Revolution, pieces of Jesuit libraries were acquired. Their libraries were scattered throughout Europe after they were banished, and even today work their way to the surface in single volumes at antique book fairs. A law in 1866 provided that all books from convents and monasteries that were closed were to be put on sale to become part of libraries. At the time of unification the government passed a law requiring that a copy of each book printed was also to be added to state libraries like the Palatina.”

  I had taken a random sample of books I might have wanted for some of my recent work via a search in the card catalogues. I tried eleven choices. My results made me feel that I was on my own, not only in what I couldn’t find or use when I needed it but in what was missing in the minds of people I knew. English language and history and literature weren’t there in any depth. Thomas Jefferson—one volume in translation. Shakespeare—in translation by Mario Praz and Quasimodo, and six plays in the original. James Joyce—some poetry, letters, Dubliners, in translation. Walt Whitman—nothing. Emily Dickinson—an essay in Italian on her work. John Ashbery—nothing. Joseph Conrad—sixteen titles in Italian, fourteen in English. Emerson, three secondary texts, including a series of translated lectures dating from 1931. Hilda Doolittle, Tribute to Freud, in translation. Ezra Pound—nothing. The King James Version of the English Bible—for me perhaps the heart of the language and a deep root in the culture—was missing. Later, a surprise to the librarians themselves, one volume printed in 1612 and ending with the Book of Psalms was found.

  I had always felt an orphan in the Palatina. There was no systematic historical, literary, scientific culture in English or translations from English. The Anglo-Saxon view was not readily browsed here, picked up and perused; it lay largely out of the cultural framework. Unavoidably, there is a political component in language. In it are histories, borders, religions. We can hardly ever feel its true size, but sometimes, when an era is over, from certain angles, often nationalistic, we see how absolutely language conditioned us. A recently published report by the CIA on Craxi in the 1980s says that he has no knowledge of English. He gets his information from the French press about international socialism. It implies that his sympathies and values lie outside English-speaking history. In Parma, its history, beyond Italian, was fertilized by French and Spanish. English is a poor cousin.

  In recent times the decision on which books to acquire was at the director’s discretion. Under the present jurisdiction, the director and his seven subordinates have become part of a more democratic process. Each has claimed a personal area of interest or expertise. Since the Parma Bourbons were Spanish, Spanish books are favored. Since the French holdings are large, they, too, are increased. No one follows science. No one particularly likes English. Dr. J.’s specialty is religion and philosophy. The budget comes from the state. It all makes good sense.

  “Do you ever consider yourselves prisoners of your own history? The fact that you go on increasing in the cultures you already possess? Isn’t most economic theory at least English or American? Isn’t much literature, including all the immigrants like Joseph Brodsky or Czeslaw Milosz or the amphibians like Vikram Seth or the women writers like Adrienne Rich, a vital part of the present everywhere in the world? What I mean is: How do we get outside of our culture? Is it a value to find models using other cultures?”

  His eyes open wide. His mouth closes. He is slightly amused. Can’t he counter that American libraries don’t have much more than Dante? Do they have Pasolini? Do they have Montale? Do they study Gramsci? Isn’t my view imperialistic? Do they teach Lenin? Don’t I want simply to impose my capitalist ideas on a place that understands well that ideas rise from culture? Aren’t we the society that has broken down under the dictatorship of commercials? Isn’t America the place where people only read best-sellers? Aren’t we the ones who can’t tell the difference between personal life and a public figure? Do we have any culture to speak of?

  He says, “Fundamentally, we in Italy are Catholic. My mother told me, ‘Religion is a mystery that can’t be explained. But believe it; believe me.’ I accepted her instruction. That’s pretty much the way it is. Manzoni criticizes Catholicism, but in hidden ways. His first wife was Protestant but she converted. He knows that you cannot eliminate religion. Our culture and history are that. The church became political in the Middle Ages because it was necessary to save the institution and society itself.”

  “I’m not entering a debate,” I insist, breaking in. “I’m not saying that I am a Protestant, although culturally I am. I simply meant to ask if the assumptions of state libraries couldn’t be broadened. What if one doesn’t come from this history? If you had more books, if people could decide for themselves, if you weren’t the arbiter, couldn’t we benefit from being in touch with a multitude of views? We are all prisoners,” I insist, feeling the surreal aspect of our conversation. Am I telling him how he should run this library? Wouldn’t it be the same in the United States? Of course, I understand the logic of not spreading oneself too thin. Why not deepen already existing resources; he’s right. It’s unreal, our conversation. But I don’t feel that. My own perplexity about being an immigrant in Parma makes me feel entitled to ask him if he has ever considered the library from that point of view—a position outside of reinforcing tradition. I realize that he doesn’t consider that important. “How can one find alternative versions or points of view? How can one get at information in general unless libraries offer a wide-open door? I’m not saying my needs are the same as the country’s,” I insist pointedly.

  A
loud knock rumbles. A friend of Dr. J.’s, a man with a pink cherubic face, rushes in. They playact, hugging each other, touching each other’s faces in a mock dance over a set of galleys. They contain information about an intellectual in eighteenth-century Parma. The cherubic man has written the text anonymously. He formally introduced the book under his own name and ghosted the essay under another name. The closed system mocks itself.

  The man hosting me introduces us and says in the same breath, “She says that we are slaves of our history.”

  “Not slaves. That word means something terrible to me. I wouldn’t use it lightly. I said prisoners.”

  The man makes a face. “You Americans don’t have history and that’s why you can’t understand it.”

  “That’s rubbish,” I say, tired of hearing so many educated people tell me that. “What do you mean?”

  He makes another face at his friend. They giggle like two schoolboys. “He’s hard on me. I always have to sneak things back into the text. What I’ve just written, he changes. Signora, calling us prisoners is better than calling us slaves. I’m sure you know that we’re hard to change.”

  After he leaves, the official begins to discuss an exhibit on Maria Luigia over the phone. This central mythical figure, Maria Ludovica, daughter of the Hapsburg emperor Francis I and the second wife of Napoleon, changed her name when she came to Parma in order to, according to the writer Luca Goldoni, have a name that sounded more Parmigiana—“like thick felt underskirts, kerchiefs on one’s head, and minestrone.” Goldoni sounds quite condescending to me. Addressing her subjects when she came to live in the palace in Colorno as the Duchess of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, Maria Luigia said, “The country in which I live is a true garden; I hold in my hands the possibility to make four hundred thousand souls happy, to protect the sciences and the arts; I am not ambitious and I hope to spend many years here, where each will resemble all the others, and all will be sweet and peaceful.” Her speech was written by a woman friend.

  Maria Luigia supported the arts and commissioned the Teatro Regio. The court went to the theater as many as four or five times a week to be amused, to eat, to chat, and later to dance and play games. Bellini’s Zaira inaugurated it; Donizetti’s work was performed frequently and Verdi’s too, although he was not a favorite. The head of the police, an impresario, a rewrite person, and four members of the theater were the administrative body.

  Maria Luigia supported the arts and commissioned the Teatro Regio

  Maria Luigia had three husbands while she was ruler—Napoleon, who was in exile; Conte Neipperg, her adviser, then lover, and finally husband; and a secret marriage after his death to Charles of Bombelles. With Napoleon she had a son; with Neipperg, two children, a boy and a girl, Albertina, whom she could never officially recognize but with whom she had an intense correspondence and with whom she met, often by using the underground passages that existed in Parma. Her second husband, Conte Adam Neipperg, who had been at Metternich’s side, tried to help Maria Luigia with the heavy preemptive censorship imposed by Austria, Lombardy, and Modena on the press and on every government document. There was a constant pressure from external powers, international ones, on the internal workings of the small capital. One of her ideas for helping her people “to conceive of themselves as not vile” was to remove from sight “every object and custom that encouraged poverty or sloth.” In her palace in Colorno, the exhibit would show the social effects and achievements of this woman’s reign. Among her subjects, on the whole, only the property owners who had the largest incomes and paid the most taxes remained unimpressed by her innovations.

  As he gets off the phone, Dr. J. calls one of his secretaries in. He asks her to search for a text written by a scribe immediately after the unification of Italy, when Parma joined the country. He has a copy made for me. “You’ll like it, I’m sure. The author notices a lot about the people. He finds them dull and conforming, frightened and resistant to change.” He gives me another set of five books. “Keep them,” he says generously. “They may help.” He looks for a bag in his drawer and comes up with a plastic one. “Here, you can carry them in this.” He has no more time. He opens his agenda to choose the next meeting. He walks me out of his office over the creaking wooden floors of rooms with books on dialect running from the floor to fifteen feet above. We seem to be observed by all the workers. I know he has been struck. I can feel some wisp of doubt has stirred. He was talking a mile a minute about Maria Luigia, but he suggested that book on the man who was to run a census on Parma and found the people resistant to change. Something happened. A sprout, something fresh, popped up at the end of our meeting that I didn’t feel when I came in. I think it was the phrase “prisoners of history,” even though he barely let me speak.

  The next time we meet, he sweeps me up to the highest level of the museum, where the Bodoni fonts are stored. He opens up window after window to give me a view of the city. With a Strauss waltz stripped in, the film would have started on a nice wide pan. Dr. J. was sharing a treasure. I could feel his generosity. I could feel how sorry he was that the English holdings were so small. He was trying to cheer me up, to argue for Parma’s great side, a public relations pitch, rather than speaking to my intellectual points.

  “This view is marvelous,” he said, flinging open the shutters, one set after the other. Domes of the cathedral and the Steccata church, decorated inside by Parmigianino, seemed to ring in the bluish light. The pink octagon of the baptistery, the quiet streets below with their yellow façades, called up Wordsworth. The swifts were flying and screeching as they groomed the air for insects. “You must love this,” he said. “Even if you feel stifled by Maria Luigia, even if you think we are not very bold, you must love this. Just the harmony and beauty of Parma.” The buildings were so close, I felt as if a Fabergé egg had been placed in my hands, but that is too small; I felt the stones and how much stood.

  The room, like the rooms below it, where Don Filippo and Don Ferdinando laid out their books in imposing halls of shelves designed by the urban planner Petitot, was as long as a triple banquet hall. The floor creaked all the way along. It was so wonderfully Italian, his gesture of trying to sweep, in a magic flash, all my petty and cranky concerns into a bigger picture of melodious peace in the eternal stones. It wasn’t smothering or seduction, but it was how Italy finally worked and worked into one’s bones—beauty and humanity, with apparently no interest in power or complete consistency, swamping claims which would challenge those premises. The physical view, the holding on to my American side, the opening into the Italian part, and the universal component of experience—with which eyes was I seeing? We looked at the specimens of Bodoni print in glass cases. They, too, were paltry in comparison with the breathtaking view. Pleased, both of us pleased, we went back into a smaller room and sat down. The issues had not disappeared.

  Toni Morrison, a recent American Nobel Prize winner, describes as “playing in the dark” the deductions to be made from what underlies the shapes white authors and characters give to black characters in works of art. Dr. J., after trying to convince me that it was not hard to fit in in Parma, that American culture was of no relevance, suddenly admitted his own foreignness. Because of who I was, he suddenly came forward. More than an admission, he made a confession. “I am from the south,” he said to me. “I am from a small village of two thousand people outside of Rome. I am a terrone.”

  Terrone is nearly a racial slur. Yet, beyond its sting, he was using it with irony and pride. Nevertheless, he had responded to me, in part at least, because he and I were stranieri, foreigners, on the outside. He had the same wish as I did for roots and space for them, a fierce interest in not disappearing as what he was. He used his dialect in his house. He went back to the village and ate its foods. History, the history of Parma that poured from his mouth, was a choice, a profession. We talk about Maria Luigia as an institution. The last exhibit on her, done in her summer palace outside Parma in Colorno, brought in forty thousand paying vi
sitors. “It makes sense,” I said. “But that doesn’t preclude new stories and stories really told from the outside, from the other side, or from spaces in between. We need not fear that we will be shallow because of lack of context. What do you know about Giovanna?”

  “Who?” he said.

  “Giovanna, the badessa Piacenza.”

  “Oh,” he said, without embarrassment. “The lovely ceiling in San Paolo’s convent. Correggio.”

  “No, her.”

  He cocked his gray head and gave a short, electrifying smile. “I’ll have to learn something about her. Her life, like all those women’s, was about a profession. It was about inheritance rights and power.”

  “It’s funny,” I said. “You see her very institutionally. She’s a blip for you in a long history that allows itself the right to use corruption, deviation, repression as explanations for the use of an institution’s power. What is she really about in human terms? Isn’t she about wanting freedom and not wanting to disappear? Isn’t she someone who challenges the status quo and pays the price? Isn’t she a woman who pays more than a man for the questions of licentiousness?

  “What if you and I pretend that we are Parmigianino seeing ourselves in the mirror? Somewhere a deforming hand occupies the foreground; and it may be just us, holding ourselves in check. I’m not saying the hand is always a threat. Sometimes it is just the presence of culture as an intellectual and unified field. Maybe we should take a second look at that hand. What are the distances between you and me? My culture and yours? What if I am part of both? What if you don’t know that you, too, are part of the new world? You dismiss Giovanna because you believe you know beforehand the reasons why things happened. Everything has an intellectual interpretation. You cite tradition and would argue from analogy. But I come with a slightly different set of tools. You are sophisticated, informed. But in the same way jazz can be such a sweet, free compelling sound, I’d like to know, do you hear it? Does it tease you out? Could it occupy some new space? Reality is never fixed. If you do look back at history, at yourself, at how your beliefs were formed, where’s your wish to know what’s playing in the dark?”