The world is never gone, I think to myself. Paolo would say, “One is not much of a sample. Test it.” Then “Mercy” slips from my lips.
Homemaking is labor-intensive
[27]
BREAD
It was a long night. I couldn’t find a peaceful place anywhere in the bed. I felt so many different parts to the night. Paolo sleeps clamped shut. He is battling on at work, doing the right thing. That means rocking the boat. The apparatus is resisting. “None of us,” he said before going to bed, “really knows how to listen.”
Angela, Paolo’s sister, rings before seven o’clock this morning. In an excited voice, she informs me that it is International Poetry Day. Mario Luzi will preside over a festival in Florence.
I have a clear picture of Luzi in my mind. I have visited him twice in his very modest apartment with bookshelves everywhere. Luzi’s eyes, which have been in use for more than eighty years, are unforgettable. They possess an astounding inwardness but the great gift of seeing out as well. When we met last winter, on a snappy dark Sunday in Florence, we agreed to meet again before spring leaves covered up the gap where, if we bent down and looked through the brown metal railing around his balcony, a gray, glassy piece of the Arno could be seen. Spring came and I missed our encounter. Now I can ring because the trees will soon be bare again.
Luzi is yet another giant. Italy seems to have produced a race of men and women who are not only cultured but profoundly rooted in humanity. His generation is nearly all dead. Luzi’s astute gaze emits pointed and sometimes joyous curiosity. His wispy hair glows upward; his thinness has subtle grace and spunk. He sends out little of the pride and arrogance of a man of action. Yet not evading things through ideas has been his life; resisting the impoverishment that takes place if an action has no clear sense. His sensitive, firm shoulders protect a bare hint of a fighter. His smile is triggered by conversation that comes directly, softly, to the point. His last book accompanies us, we who might not always remember what it means to follow the river toward a mysticism that Florence inspires.
Luzi and I met both times on a Sunday. Here are a few lines about Sunday, the day he often works in his small study on translations and galleys of his work:
She unmakes us, reforms us
light
in her airy lap,
mother-magician-dominica
lavisher of absence
that forgives our every debt,
annihilates us from every book
and cancels us all
from the past and the present.
For an afterwards
perhaps, for a starting over.
Angela, on the phone, laughs again. “I wanted you to know,” she said. “It’s your day.” I thank her for remembering. I cannot thank her enough. I feel like putting a flag on my head as I go to stand in line for bread. Leaving just before me, Paolo mentions that in the film he watched last night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Spencer Tracy listens and people listen to him … International Poetry Day. Bread fetchers, do you know what that means?
It seems useful to put poetry in relation to the morning headline that Craxi’s conversations on his portable phone from Tunisia have been intercepted. Perhaps we have proof (by contested means) that he has mounted a huge campaign to discredit the judiciary. Di Pietro’s troubles were aggravated because a mole somewhere authorized taping his phones. Poetry sometimes addresses realities like this, but usually without much success. Poets themselves can, though, by using their powers to give.
Luzi denounced censorship in the Berlusconi government when Luzi was told by the Italian ambassador to Prague, after Luzi spoke there, that he was not free to criticize the Italian state. He put the issue to the press some months back and they let it drop after a day’s analysis, much to his alarm. We talked last winter about the worsening climate. His eyes controlled the conversation and set its pace. Their incredible refractions turn inward, deep into his brain, where they stay searching or resting in quiet. Then they turn around. Sometimes they are carrying words. Sometimes they are wide open and listening. Poetry needs space to be as exact as possible. “I lived in Parma once,” he said, “a nice place. I lived in a splendid courtyard. Parma’s small, though, in many respects.”
I am on my way to get bread, or, as rolls are called in Parma, micche. Many differences in the two cultures can be summed up in my failure to change this routine. This world refuses to fall apart. The area around Parma calls itself Food Valley. Today it announced a $14 million advertising campaign for prosciutto. The slogan will be: “Il dolce è il crudo di Parma.” Making a pun on the term prosciutto crudo, it literally says, “Sweetness is Parma crude” or “The sweet is the rawness of Parma.” Of course, it says this in subliminal flashes and plays on a broad band of meanings in its image. But there it is: the down-to-earth heartiness of Correggio.
The micca, a solid, saltless, fairly moist roll in a double squarish shape of Romanesque power (a lap’s two rounded thighs), doesn’t seem like much. But its spirit is boss. The soft, pale crust, much thinner and duller than, say, the crisp high-temperature explosion of French or Tuscan bread, is broken and eaten in little chips. The inside, la mollica, the soft, cloudlike white part, was a traditional prize for children. Now, without the poverty and neighborhood ovens that made this gesture a gift, its specialness has turned into an old wives’ tale. Often a wrinkled woman will confide, as her weather-stung eyes brighten, that nothing—not roast veal, not tortelli covered with butter and cheese—tastes as good as a micca.
The word micca, used for Parma’s bread, is common to many Italian cities and means a plain shape. However, the lump made here, about the size of a laborer’s fist, is not recognized as local even in the next city, twenty kilometers south. Although the wheat-driven, flat, rich farmlands from Piacenza to Bologna appear nearly continuous, interrupted only with verticals of poplar and mulberry trees and imposing brick farmhouses, the pasts diverge, from city to city. The micca belongs to this place. Its awkward jaw-stretching mass, never intended for sandwiches, doesn’t bother a Parma native when prosciutto is inside.
Food is the central focus to life in Parma. Fresh bread is the hub of the wheel, the center of the family’s daily ritual of coming together. Beyond nearly two thousand years of church history and its transformation of bread into everlasting life are at least another five thousand years when wheat was cultivated, its green sprouts permitting survival in stable groups and articulated civilization.
I was not surprised to see that in 1719 bread in the English language moved from “a doughy article prepared by moistening and kneading” to “a means of subsistence”—that is, a metaphor for individual earning. In England, the first country to modernize and suffer the trauma of separating food production from daily life—a continuous reality since Neolithic times—bread set out on a new, unknown course. The English language was ready to absorb and trace the ferment brought about by machines and commerce. Its power was lifted away from the home, nourishment, and women. It began leaving its food meanings to stand for earning itself. Byron, a century later, went so far as to assert that even writing fell into bread’s omnipresent, growing economic connotation. “He meant no harm in scribbling, it was his bread.”
The drive of industrialization and free-market ideas uproot and scatter bread’s nonverbal, domestic associations. Bread adapts its basic roots and disappears into mechanical time, into new and different forms of wealth. In America it works as slang for cash.
Bread is deeply implanted in the European mind. Words in Indo-European languages still carry the marks of the domestication of wheat, and thus of bread’s pathways. Moving west from the Middle East, where wheat’s wild kernel was domesticated nearly seven thousand years ago, and perhaps further mixed and pushed by horse peoples from Siberia, bread became a staple as wheat became a crop. The knowledge of domestication traveled, as did the men and women, tribes, ideas, and languages, mixing and warring, since people were the carriers and not winds, birds, or ch
ance.
In the English word for bread, the Old German bhreu lies underneath. The black ash of the fire from the Middle Ages and its hot coals, as well as the bubble of the leaven, cling to the English words burning, warming, hatching, as well as to rearing young and to breeding. These words originate from the same German roots that belong to making bread. They are culture-snapshots. Bread was, by then, nearly a heart in sheltered units and homes. In northern countries it was tied to the woman—wife plus man. In Latin countries to the donna—the padrona, the queen, the mother.
Yeast, flour, and water. Add waiting, punching down, warmth. The active substance devours. The mass grows. A doughy elastic substance comes into being. Bread. Call it family: fresh, stale, hanging on, filling bitter hunger, nourishing hopes, crusty and chewable, sometimes all there is.
Clare, I think, is fascinated by bread. Paolo cannot throw even a crust away without a sense of frustration. He learned from me how to bake bread, and now, when the napkin over the bowl nudges up, he’s often invented a new recipe. For him, bread signifies a sacred gift.
In the matrix language, Indo-European, the word dheigh means “the bread kneader” as well as “the mistress of the house.” From that language come roots which in English underlie molding and shaping. As cultivation of wheat spread from the Middle East, so did these ideas mingle in words. “Shaping mud or clay walls” is the root for “shaping a loaf.” “Walled round” in Avestan is pairidaēza. The Greeks borrow pairidaēza and it migrates into English as paradise. The march of the domestication of wheat across Europe from east to west creates exchange and meanings that stick to bread through language. Modern translation, taking a word into its present state, is an interesting exercise with a word as central as bread.
Bread is old but not really old on the human time scale. It assumes mythical power in Christ and is spread by the Latin. The shaping action of kneading bread in Latin fits into figure, prefigure, transfigure, all related to the act of bread as communion and the body of Christ. Bread is shared and divided, and as a rule, in this spiritual multiplication, limits of ego apparently dissolve. In its most formal spiritual meaning, the Eucharist, unleavened bread, Christ’s transubstantiated body, is offered to all who want its salvation.
The action of shaping also fits feigning, fictive, and fiction. These fired crusts of Mediterranean stereotypic female wiles and the creative impulse still have salt and taste. Bread in Parma contains life, culture, economics, biological and psychological truth and symbol, bound to earth and physicality that began here at least thirty-five hundred years ago.
Growing up in Wisconsin, we used Wonder bread with its cheery blue and red circles on the waxy wrapping paper. If the long package was placed wrong in the heavy brown paper shopping bags loaded with cans, it emerged from the back of the station wagon looking as if a bike had run over it. Even if we tried to revive the loaf by shaking it into shape, by the time it was trekked from the freezer as an asymmetric glacier, hearth fire and black ash, fragrance and generative connotations were not even imaginable. The package thawed like a forgotten and dubious foreign body, humped in my mother’s unasked-for domain—the Formica-covered, dishwasher- and disposal-driven kitchen, where instead of a table, a snack counter stuck out from the wall. “We live in the space age,” Mom would say. “All these wonderful spin-offs from planning for jet planes and outer space.”
The importance of fresh bread is the single fact I can think of to characterize life in Parma. Understanding some of its meanings and levels amounts to a solid generalization about people who live here. The government still sets the price for bread as well as for salt and newspapers. This is true for bread because it would be immoral to let the price go beyond people’s means. Ordinary bleached-flour bread remains around two and a half dollars for a kilo.
In I Promessi Sposi, the theme of bread is taken up in many places. Renzo, a protagonist, gets swept up in the passions of a bread riot (the novel is set in 1630). Bread in that scene alone takes up more than fifty pages. It’s nibbled, begged for, gathered up, hurled; crowds surge, willing to kill for it. After the riot subsides, and Renzo is slightly drunk and trying to go to sleep, he hears a provocateur explain:
“I’d make sure there was bread for everybody, for rich and poor alike… . And this is the way I’d do it. A fair price that anybody could afford; and then give out the bread according to the number of mouths there are to eat it; for there are some greedy swine who’d want to hog the lot—they’d just dive in and help themselves, and then there wouldn’t be enough for the poor folks. So the bread must be divided up properly. This is the way it would be done. Each family would have a card, saying how many mouths there were to feed, to take with you when you went to the baker.”
Manzoni set his novel in 1630 in part to explore topics censored by the Austrians who were ruling Milan at the time Manzoni was writing. Bread as a central issue in his fictional Milan riot was about independence, but not in the sense understood by the Englishmen who dumped tea into Boston Harbor. Tea was an issue of taxation and the right to determine one’s own economic and private destiny thousands of miles from the ruler. In Manzoni’s actual occupied Milan, the struggles were still about basic survival for the dominated masses who were yet to know national citizenship or any substantial political rights. A bread riot as political action was about survival and equitable distribution to a dominated collectivity.
If we looked at the New England coast two centuries earlier than the American Revolution (around the time of Manzoni’s fiction), we would see that it was being tilled by Native Americans. Capitalism, that devouring god, was unknown to them and their pursuits. They made their bread from crushed corn. Eppur si muove.
In Christianity, bread, apart from its importance as food, becomes one of the primary symbols of Catholicism. In essence today, too, the humanity and sacredness in bread live in Italy. The “blessed” poor of Catholicism and the “wretched” poor of Marx have long been comrades. In conceptions that overlap, both see government’s role in furnishing basic needs as a morality. Both groups will tell you that bread is a social right and remains, as such, greater than claims about budgets or costs or laziness or welfare cheating. Poverty is due to the indigenous “others”—fate or the means of production—and therefore bread, if lacking, must be given to human beings. The economics of bread are communal; its life is not individualistic. The altruism might be seen as motherly and outside economic history. The right to nourishment is as indisputable as being born from a woman.
Last night, outside Santa Cristina’s, a sixteenth-century church on the main road in the center, a large placard inviting people to mass proclaimed: “Inside the law of profit, there is murder.” Capitalism’s Protestant roots of unbounded individuality are still contested by both the church and the left.
Bread, which often becomes a private tyranny in the rhythm of three daily meals eaten together, has more power in Italian lives than any law proposed by a politician. It calls people home. It is part of identity. Yet, like mushroom hunting for the big porcini mushrooms with the twig-green velvet gills that once were free for the finding and now require a license to collect, like village churches in the foothills that were open all day long and now are locked until the rotating priest arrives for a weekly mass, bread, inasmuch as it is linked to the woman, is finding its roots exposed and dug up in Parma.
The connotation of home and bread, seen through the lens of motherhood, is seemingly quite different in early-twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon Protestant and Latin Catholic perspectives. Latin countries that were traditionally poor in modern centuries find balm and sustenance in the home. Women’s place in the home remains elevated, of economic as much as emotional importance in a hostile, unfair, and violent world. In Italy, for example, women’s work in the house—until quite recently often a shelter with a bathroom added on—meant survival at many levels.
In the second chapter of Ulysses (obviously Catholic Dublin but written in and about the religion of the Medite
rranean world), Stephen Dedalus is mourning his mother’s death. Observing a student unable to solve a simple math problem, Stephen thinks: “Ugly and futile… . Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail… . She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been.” In spite of Joyce’s fundamental opposition to Catholicism, he still reflects a Catholic sensibility toward a mother as the center of life, a noneconomic giving, in a hostile, impecunious world where one has no possibility of influence. The student without his mother’s attention would have been literally crushed. In her attitude of sacrifice is implicit her resistance to the world’s race. She is given credit for his survival in a world where the politics were colonial and oppressive, capitalistic, and brutal. This fact and fiction cannot be reduced without the utmost care.
Looking for this strand in an English contemporary, I picked Virginia Woolf. In A Woman’s Place she explores the important aspects of motherhood and home. Not so surprisingly, some of the differences appear in economic language, reflecting not merely personal realities but the different cultural systems and economic strengths of the two countries. Woolf, besides seeing her bourgeois mother as a swimmer who grows weaker and weaker, orients the role’s positive sides only after discarding economic terms—that is, its waste. Released from these confines, Woolf sees her mother’s life, in spite of her qualifiers, as a whole. She says:
But when we exclaim
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