On the side of the cathedral, Antelami’s powerful Madonna
[24]
GETTING THERE
Over the weekend, R., a friend of Paolo’s and mine, reached a frenzy of awareness in the Iper-coop, the enormous grocery chain organized by the Communist Party. He had taken in a cartload of glass bottles and his intention was to retrieve the deposit and go home. He stood in the mass of shoppers until it was his turn. The clerk told him that she couldn’t redeem the bottles for cash. “It’s not a problem. Just buy something, anything, and I’ll give you credit.”
R. ruminated for a moment and then the thud of disillusionment assaulted him.
“Signorina, I don’t want to buy anything. I want cash.”
“We can’t,” she said innocently. “I said just buy anything.”
“I don’t want to buy. Buying and selling is the basis of capitalism. Why should we always buy? We fought so that workers could have some freedom from this pressure. People are forced to enter a cycle where they become slaves to this mechanism. Signorina, this store has roots resisting that principle.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but that’s the rule. There’s no problem, really. Buy some pasta or soap or something you really need. People are waiting.”
“We’re the people and we’re keeping the door open. If not us, there are still immigrants who might need the cash. You’re being paternalistic to force them to buy against their will. We must not lose our way. What if a Moroccan doesn’t want to buy? What if he needs the money to pay a bill?”
He looked at her bewildered and irritated face. She was young and bored and sexy.
“You don’t know anything about history,” he shouted at her as he shook the cartful of bottles. It was the worst indictment he could think of, the worst scenario. As he rattled the cart, he could hear murmuring around him. He shook it again and gave it a shove, letting it weave on its own course and smash harmlessly into another bank of carts. He threw up his hands and left it there. “Keep your money,” he shouted as the green bottles settled down. R. stalked out of the supermarket aching inside. The woman with dull brown eyes had made him feel middle-aged. It was impossible that the crammed parking lot and the glutted store were the prized and nearly tasteless fruits of his thirty-year fight for the worker. History wasn’t this moment of ease—of shopping. The incident was a bad joke. “I felt if I had shouted once more, some of the men would have tried to push me gently into my car and take me away,” he told Paolo with his charming, bittersweet regret.
R. is one of the most principled and broad intellectuals I know. His mind is a slow walk through beautiful distinctions. He lived the Communist years as a member, often in isolation. He stood up to its violent parts, held out for the individual. He tithed to the Party. He went to college using an oil lamp. When people really got on his nerves, though, he might have delicately slipped in that he was so hungry growing up that sometimes his family ate cat, that his first five minutes out of bed might have been spent picking off lice. His supermarket story broke my heart. I felt for him, and for the topsy-turvy heaves that make reading this moment so frustrating.
I listened to his story and almost mentioned, but didn’t dare, that a little white bird had landed on Clare’s handlebars that same weekend. She was waiting at the stoplight on her bike, and a white bird, the size of a canary, maybe even a tame bird making an escape, flew out of the sky and rested on her handlebars, leaving her stunned and happy with the mystery.
I know how easy it is to feel lost and I wanted to say that to R. Yet I respect him and I know he has nearly no space for omens in the way he reads the world. In my head, I saw my older brother in Chile—in the winter, although we are in summer in Parma. He works on human rights, and reversals for him often mean that a regime has fallen and black and white as meanings often flip. I thought of a Jewish friend who was a pacifist and after thirty years of that position felt he was being judgmental. He could see circumstances in which it might be necessary to fight. He became a Catholic. I thought of a painter friend in Parma who was spending time cooking because her mother-in-law was ill and needed her help. “So the weeks,” she said, “will go like that. I’ll keep busy by doing little things. Chestnuts are belle but soaking them takes time. I shall make a Monte Bianco. Yet tomorrow, when the sunset makes me feel that there is one day less to the whole of my life, after I put her to bed I may paint in the evening, even though there’s no light.” And I thought of Paolo, who was thrilled because his seeds were coming up, a little flock of beeches, where he was going to trace the lines of families in a forest. “Each one,” he said, “has a little helmet that breaks apart into two little leaves. We have more than six hundred planted, nearly two thousand in all.” And I thought of my own dream in which I didn’t want to lock a door, and I stepped over a half door and resisted closing the large one. A woman warned me to close it and she did it by slamming it. Then it opened on its own.
I wanted to say all that to this man who remains so dedicated and nuanced, so good he could be a saint. But in the same way I have told him that he could save himself from hand-copying by just learning a few commands on a computer and he’s never done it, I didn’t want to suggest something that was of no help or meaning, It’s not that he won’t listen. It’s just that any change feels like loss and loss of principle and loss of definition. There is one thing, though, that I can’t stand. He feels it is too late for him. That bothers me. He’s only fifty-four, I freely remind him.
But I don’t see a way to cheer him up about those bottles. It’s good he shook them hard. Like the woman who came to help me with the house. After six years of living with her mother-in-law, she threw a vase at her. “I couldn’t take it a day longer. I told my husband it was her or me.”
I hear that vase hitting the floor. I hear those bottles shaking. It is a moment like that. A friend in France felt the roar of thunder far off across the valley. She saw lightning on the other side of the mountain. She thought: The next one will strike the house. In a split second, half the circuits went out. She thinks that she drew the lightning toward the house. I don’t know if that’s possible, but perhaps her mind caught a sense that it was on its way. It’s difficult to understand how strong the mind really is.
The scrambling will go on for a while. Giulio, here for his Monday lesson, told me that he broke into the Pentagon from Parma. Seeing my face, he added, “Nothing special, just a tour of what they have in the buildings. Internet.” The other week when I needed a stronger arm, he offered to cut down a tree that was full of mold. Short of the final few strokes, he asked, “What do you say in English when it falls? I’ve seen it in films, but I forgot.” “Timber,” I say. “Oh, yeah, but why?” “I suppose,” I say, “the lumberjacks were announcing there would soon be logs for wood.”
It was Giulio who on seeing Paolo’s book told me, “He’ll be immortal.” I laughed. “I can’t think of anyone, especially not a rugby player and engineer, who is your age in the United States who would say that about his book. Famous. Rich. Immortal speaks of your roots, Giulio.” It is Giulio who feels he’s on the rim of a new era; he sees it as technology rather than politics. “When I was born, cars and TV were already invented. The Internet is the first real change that belongs to my generation.”
And Bob Keohane is coming. Paolo is excited; once again he takes out his little red bibles. Angela and Clare have furnished them, one at a time, as gifts. Paolo’s Touring Club Italiano guides have seen us through city after city, church after church. Bob’s visits are those Paolo most carefully plans for. Bob cares, as Paolo does, about directions, dates of battles, geomorphology, paintings, the environment, past and present politics. Paolo will spend an evening gathering and organizing sources. Bob, my long-ago boss at Stanford, has become a member of the family. He makes U-turns, flying in from political science conferences in Germany, Greece, France, and somewhere turning back or forward to get on a train to Parma. There’s no end to the pleasures of Bob’s visits.
Thi
s time Paolo has in mind a trip following the pilgrims’ routes—twelfth-, thirteenth-, fourteenth-century journeys, on foot or by caravan, with smart mules and skittish horses, men and women and people of the church, walking a hundred or more kilometers in a mixture of piety, adventure, and hedging bets. Our path began in France and eventually leads into Fidenza, then Fornovo, Berceto, and down to Pontremoli on the way to Rome. Another route, originating in Germany and passing over the Alps, winds through these same places. Riding in the car between cities, we will explore Romanesque churches, then good meals, local wines, pastas different from tortelli. The first church, that in Fidenza, has a frieze illustrating Charlemagne’s passage through. Paolo has several panels to point out, and we see the Lombards again, and on the side of the cathedral, Antelami’s powerful Madonna.
Pilgrimage sounds old and Italian. It also strikes the American chord of pilgrims. Tracing routes that once were walked as searches pleases us; stopping at points where people prayed, were convivial, ate, and slept. The way Paolo has prepared it, we will feel the scale of life, the meaning of distance.
Prodi, the Ulivo candidate, has designed a whistle-stop tour of the country. He is adopting an American idea and wants to meet people and to listen. He compares himself with JFK. Scoffed at, he went anyway. We three pilgrims will be wearing running shoes. If only Bob’s wife were along, it would be perfect. Her job as a university president provides little time for such frivolous excursions. Bob and Nan have broken up the mystery of radical ground: working wives with children. Politics in the United States surfaces and we pick Bob’s brain. But we let politics rest. We drop back into the intriguing idea of search in general. Our cushioned soles and the little red book make the climb up the beautiful hill to the church in Berceto a wonderful calming moment. We look out over the dramatic, green valley. Paolo has plans for good weather and alternatives for rain. We cast three votes for blue.
[25]
FINDING LANGUAGE
Can’t you skip it? What does it mean, a distinction between a language to live in and a language for living?
For me, the first encompasses silence and unknowability—the unutterable, the wish to accept words’ limits. The latter works for action, for politics, for thinking out loud, for most art, for consistency, for reason.
What are you getting at? Why this diversion?
For me, the plummet into the unspoken had been something like prayer, private, internal, but infinite like sky. It was universal. Moving to Italy, the unspoken was disturbed and replaced by an endless language: English, the lost, beloved, kept inside. Unused in an essential way, English altered into memory, imagination, buried silences. Over the years in the every day, the wish for exchange in English as the language for living, to make it revive its richness, aggravated a realization that it might never come. In some ways, English became a progressive blindness and deafness.
Do you believe all that?
Admitting the loss was like watching a gorgeous indestructible bridge snapping. I had walked on it since the day I was born, and now I let it go. Of course, it was an idea, an interpretation, and nothing is ever really lost. But the bridge fell, once and for all.
Where did that leave you?
Isn’t it obvious? Without the bridge. Devastated, uncertain, but not done in. You need another one. Maybe not a bridge. Maybe a rope, some twigs. Maybe you’ll swim. But living without the bridge breaks up what barred you from believing you could not reach another. You surrender a few books; grow more human. You realize you weren’t in all books anyway. You crawl. Aesthetics won’t be enough. Politics don’t work. Sex needs space. You love adventure. You know you will suffocate and die if you always work comparatively. You’re forced to accept complexity and solitude as barely the beginning. Understanding chaos is elemental in a writer’s journey; the new language gets stripped to clear, simple, and true—to cold, to lovely. Your heart cries out as it opens an inch.
And women?
Once you know that you are without a bridge—that what’s been lived can only come back as memory, through someone’s mind—women can start from anywhere in a language. Even from down on bruised, angry, inflamed knees scrubbing. Living has been so underwritten. The bits and pieces, the felt, the buried, the magical, the sacred, the intellectual, the molting, the courage that has no sum will come out from the gaps, the rubbish, the sand piles they are trying to forget and throw away. Memory is personal and collective. It’s unmeasurable how much has been lived and is just waiting to be told.
What are you saying?
There’s no going back. I crossed on a bridge that others built; English carried me, but it no longer exists for daily traffic. What I wish to give is different from a long story of how I got there. But it may have to be told first.
Do you remember the first butterfly?
Of course, but I can’t always keep it in mind. It’s not that I forget. But it doesn’t fit in. It is nearly impossible to always remember it. It’s too beautiful. It doesn’t refer to words.
Tell it.
It was not much bigger than a cornflake. I let it land and enjoyed that. It stopped on my shoulder. It was May and sunny in Parma. I talked with the postman, and after a few minutes brushed it off.
This is the thing about facts. These are not strange. Who would ever guess?
It followed me into the house. I’d left the door open, because the phone was ringing. You know the rest.
It came in, flew down the hall. It plunged suddenly to the ground. You knelt and it flew into your palm.
Language to live in feeds and changes you, if you fall toward it.
It opened its wings. It stayed on your palm.
The orange-and-black butterfly walked my palm on what would have been my son’s tenth birthday. My desert heart felt the first scalding drops of rain. The language we use for living is our own. The butterfly flew from a further corner: a myth of greater light.
The sky is brightening
[26]
DUCKS
As I walk on the main street, the Bank-o-mat shines fuori servizio, out of order. Stoplights no longer blink but hold to red and green. The guard is about to change.
The river cups stray light. The water is quite high and almost winter aquamarine. Surprising me as I turn the corner of the Via Mazzini onto the walking path, a man’s bare bottom, pink and tired, flashes. He quickly slaps his body down on the marble bench. A black rucksack, worn out like a thin tire, covers his lap. His face is unshaven, white; his eyes avert crashing into mine. He has arisen from a night under the stone bridge and is changing his wet, earth-soaked clothes before Parma fully awakens. A refugee from the East, he tries to hide. He gropes for his soiled pants, dropped like a hobbling past around his ankles. Instead of taking them off, he pulls their cover back on. A fat velour armchair holds a surreal discourse on normality from its place under the bridge. The sky is brightening.
Down where the gravel bed juts above the water two disgruntled ducks wade out of the reef onto land. They flash their spiffy feet, as intensely colored as mandarini, the Christmas tangerines that will come in a few months to the markets. Webbed, extravagant, the eyesore limbs poke along, excessive and surprising. The couple, she a muted, mottled thrush and he, the drake, charged with a bottle-green neck and a white ring below, wobble through high, uncut brush and green bowing cover. As I walk on, they, too, move on to navigate where the river, punctuated by flipping wavelets, grows deeper. They reenter and the red disappears like snuffed flames. Mirroring their pattern in flight, the ducks’ ruddering feet carve two Vs in water. The scribble drags nicely. Then, surprisingly, they are swept downstream by the currents. In an instant, that’s all, the two buoyant, diligent bodies shipwreck, out of control, returned to the gravel reef they started from. I must tell Clare: Being a duck is not that easy.
Giulio Andreotti is about to go on trial in Sicily. At age seventy-eight he may not even see the process end. The prosecution plans to use more than three years to present the evidence. Qaddafi
has apparently announced he is willing to pay Andreotti’s legal expenses. In some ways this is as compromising as the accusation that Andreotti kissed Toto Rina, the head of the Sicilian Mafia. I read in the paper that William Colby, who in the early 1950s ran CIA operations in Italy, admitted that the United States had given support to the Demochristians to the tune of about $25 million a year during his stay. He defended Andreotti as having had no links with the Mafia. In Parma the Lega, the party led by Umberto Bossi, continues to grow. Playing on racism, it wants to sever north and south in an aggressive fantasy. President Scalfaro has said calls for separatism are anticonstitutional.
At my back cars collect like a factory starting up, the first hour of ignited engines spewing out combustion. As I lean over the bridge beyond the classical liceo, a white leaf on the ground catches my eye. The leaf, five-pointed like a maple’s, shines white. Another can be spotted like a handkerchief on the still-green carpet of brush accompanying the river. Then the tree producing these unearthly leaves appears beyond a cluster of trees. Tall and full, with a black ruvid twenty-year trunk, its albino silence spreads. All its leaves are white. It stops me still.
My mind rushes to dress the tree. “Majestic” comes closest. Is “majestic” a cover, an invention, a wish? Is the tree really sick because of our ministrations? Or a mutation? Or just this year’s response to its own cycle of rings? “Or” is a pivot which ultimately lands on one side. Must it? William James said that “ ‘or’ names a real reality.” Can it remain swinging like a teeter-totter? The white leaves shake like a shimmering mood. What is its context?
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