Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

at the extravagant waste of such a life we are

  inclined no doubt to lose that view of surrounding

  parts, the husband and child and home which if you

  see them as a whole surrounding her, completing

  her, robs the single life of its arrow-like speed

  and its tragic departure. What is noticeable about

  her, as I am come to think, is not the waste and

  futile gallantry, but the niceness, born of sure

  judgment, with which her effort matched her aim.

  There was scarcely any superfluity; and it is for

  this reason that, past as those years are, her mark

  on them is inescapable, as though branded by the

  naked steel, the sharp, the pure.

  In the privilege of Woolf’s position, we still see the emotional importance of the female and personal attention in the Anglo-Saxon home. We see the conflict, too. Society’s powerful economic reality—its surpluses and inequities in possibilities—should for the upper-class woman have offered freedom and release, in theory. Thus, society’s language of economic worth casts the mother’s value in doubt. It is when her life, initially quantified as an extravagant waste, escapes this economic metaphor that it joins a collectivity and her acts assume a different meaning. In this light, her life reveals no “superfluity.” Considered from an angle outside of society’s economic gauge, Woolf’s mother’s life progresses from “niceness” to the power of “naked steel.” The situation is judged from an existential point of view. Like the mass of others with little choice, her mother’s life assumes its meaning based on relationships.

  In the above scene in Ulysses, after Dedalus watches the floundering youth, a colleague presses Stephen to think of a phrase that would identify an Englishman beyond a shadow of a doubt. Mr. Deasy’s answer is an individualistic capitalist cry: “I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing. Can you?” Deasy is insisting on the “rightness” of seeing English culture in economic terms. In the Anglo-Saxon Protestant world—once quite basically different from the Latin Catholic world in its economic development—money as an individual pursuit and possibility in capitalism is central to independence from anyone. It brings about a growing middle class. It begins to define and irrevocably change social patterns at least a century and a half earlier in England and the New World than for the life of the common person in Italy. That this reality is seeded in literature and is enforced by religion is not all that surprising.

  Seeing the mother as an unsubstitutable substance shared remains far longer as a cultural reality inside poverty that copes by relying on collective solutions. The homemaker is the female and thus the real provider of bread, an essential and miraculous part of domestication, and often survival. As a noneconomic entity, the female, as mother, will have far less value and important literary space in society that is already strongly capitalist, colonialist, and laissez-faire. In capitalism, her bourgeois functions as a mother are anomalous as far as language about value is concerned. In her “niceness” she is also a luxury, not to say a nonperson. With progress defined as a belief in individualistic terms and a free-market system, bread loses its significant flavor as a domestic value. Where simple bread is held up as nourishing and central, where the mother’s worth is celebrated as a necessity, we can assume the model of the world outside the home is dark and hostile.

  My first remembrance of bread in American literature is not a collective sense or one elevating female value. Thoreau writes at some length about bread in Walden. His unforgettable book grazes in our American minds as one of our first sacred cows. His phrase each “marching to his own drummer” is a stepping-stone to freedom. Nevertheless, it’s achieved at a cost. He sets a terrible antisocial standard, mocking home life or even simple social intercourse. Misogyny permeates his text’s Puritan rigidness and its promise.

  In his chapter on economics, Thoreau cites a Latin recipe for bread given by the Roman agriculturist Marcus Porcius Cato. He transforms it into a recipe for self-sufficiency. Discarding the advice given to him by “housewives” who insisted that yeast was needed for “safe and wholesome” bread, he discards home. After defining yeast conventionally as the “the soul of bread, the spiritus,” he decides that Cato, mute on the subject of leaven, proves its unimportance. Thoreau shows, too, how, with survival as his goal, “this staff of life” was neither always possible nor necessary. It’s an important Yankee position. One need not acknowledge the female side of one’s nature or life and soul that, like yeast, exists as “its own sweet will.”

  The home and mother are denied social or economic importance in the odyssey of the self-seeker. Her shaping power, her story telling about life’s meaning, her keeping things together and resisting change or riding it through, are missing in this Protestant stance. Her grasp of a sensuous reality that transforms has been subtracted from ideas of making a worthy life. Bread, a domestic but unintellectual, uneconomic, unchanging measure of time, a collective symbol of limit and limitless hope, is not given space at the heart of daily life where self-reliance is the standard and economics a measure. Emily Dickinson, another voice who lived at home but despised domestic life as her lot, wrote, “God keep me from what they call households.” Bread’s collectivity and its fixed relationships are rejected as oppression.

  Variety in bread shapes and costs have crept in since the 1980s in Parma. Perhaps this change occurred as people began to travel, had more money, and devoted more time to watching TV bring in the world. In the blond compressed wood bins that give a clean northern look to the bread, like Swedish puppet theaters of health, long thin French baguettes, round soya loaves with seeds covering them like pelt markings, olive bread, white puffed Arab bread rest side by side. Micche, blunt bundles vaguely resembling trussed hay, enriched with their touch of lard, have whole bins for themselves.

  If they fell from heaven out of the sky, tumbling and raining like manna, the no-nonsense pelting of micche would look like something to run from. As they clattered to the ground, people who have lived here all their lives would recognize their milky caffè latte color as a collective sign of place. And if it weren’t for the Parmigiani’s deep conditioning of being suspicious of food made by others or strangers, they would feel joy upon seeing the bread. We Americans, on the other hand (though that designation is difficult to use now as an inclusive voice), once we absorbed the shock, might pick the rolls up, all the while thinking about how much time was involved in collecting a pile of them. We might consider ourselves spiritually blessed. Soon after, some monetary thought would take focus—could we license them, package them, were they sanitized, was the bread worth anything at all? If we were poor, we would furtively hide a micca in our pocket to avoid public shame. If we were from the suburbs, we might ask if some unseen force had laced them with drugs.

  Often Parmigiani over sixty do the shopping. They are retired husbands or wives, running errands for their children’s households. Pane comune (flour, water, salt, and yeast), impossible to find any longer, has been replaced by pane condito (with lard added). The predictable micca, served more than once a day in this way, echoes the mass, said morning and evening in many churches in the city.

  A recent referendum to let stores decide their own hours—staying open on Sundays or evenings in order to compete better—was turned down by the voters. The result confirmed that everyone should be home to eat together, to live for reasons beyond work. Competition should not be wide open. The state should keep an even hand on things so that the powerful don’t overwhelm the small and so that work is not an omnipresent obsession. Family is the unit of safety and the micca a conservative symbol. Why would one like to live far from one’s children or even the difficulties of difficult parents, given that life is made from relationships? Without micche, a fundamental starvation would set in.

  Years back, teaching a voluntary after-school course in the liceo, I saw how widespread this logic was among my st
udents. “Why,” they asked, “would anyone want to leave home or this place? It’s all here. We have everything anyone could want,” they would say, leaning back on their slightly broken chairs. “Except the unknown,” I kept telling them. “Except freedom to try with a new seriousness. Except even the possibility to use the chemistry lab that is locked for fear of dirtying the equipment.” “Why,” they asked querulously, “would you want to compete? Our parents give us everything we need.”

  The belief that society should or would ever be capable of offering fair competition still has small or no appeal. The echo from James Joyce, out of context, out of date, still sounds: “But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot.” In a mother’s love there is often the explicit message: “Don’t trust anyone else’s food.” Better to count on one’s own flesh and blood, and in society to keep up a front.

  Everyone comes home in Parma. Where else would you go? And why stay alone or work through the lunch hour when you could stay together, in compagnia, have a glass of wine, take a nap? Sometimes feeling another meal deadline approach (there is one every four hours and it is intensely counted on and lived), I think that my whole body will go into the shakes. Women go to great lengths, possibly unconsciously, but probably not, even when there is resentment and exhaustion, to provide well-prepared enticements to remaining together. Since meals must be done, why not make them good? Meals mean that the river of family sits down.

  In elementary school, Clare suffered often from the fact that her school friends’ parents did not allow their children to eat at our house. There are high paranoiac walls around food. Clare could eat at their homes, but her friends never crossed the frontier of our food. Change might spring out as an unwanted surprise like conquering troops from the Trojan horse and the children might escape.

  Kids eventually came to our house for the much-speculated-upon Thanksgiving (though it took almost until high school). The feast, beyond its powerful memory of American family and friends for me, but also for Clare and Paolo, is the only common menu our disparate American nation shares. Therefore it resonates with a strong feeling of belonging.

  I begin the feast by reading from testimonies of Native Americans. The passages recount stories of the historical, uncomprehended and incomprehensible moment when some of their people saw white faces for the very first time. I find that moment millions of times more stark and significant than when man landed on the moon. My voice trembles. It is as if I can still feel inside these memories—often foreshadowed by prophecies, by foreboding, or by the need to explain—the energies that were killed and dispersed as people were not allowed to pursue their places and religious natures. As I struggle to hold on, some of Clare’s friends’ desperate giggles jolt me forward to the meal.

  With some fanfare, the magnificent bird is marched from the oven, where its fats have sputtered since early morning. Usually more than ten kilos, it is awesome, golden brown, and has occupied every centimeter of the tiny oven. Held high, it receives oohs and aahs. Its long hours of roasting have wafted a slight greasy scent of turkey through all the rooms in the house. In my childhood, this smell was the optimal sign of welcome. Instead, it is sin number one in Parma. Food smells must remain tightly closed in the kitchen with the overburdened cook. Inevitably, someone asks to open the windows wide. There is an excited skepticism, nearly a fear, among the kids about the meal. The Italian adults who attend our feast are academics who have been inoculated by the experience in the States and they are gracious enthusiasts. The young people are another matter.

  Cranberry sauce that I carried in cans like heavy treasure from the States gets translated by a bright young lad, not as a bog plant, but as a “growth from a swamp.” Its crimson dabs remain smeared on the plates. Someone says, being egged on, that it looks like blood drawn by leeches. The equivalent of “oh, yuck”—“che schifo”—ripples politely around the table. Most of the kids refuse more than a whittled strand of turkey. They have seen turkey in Italy, but it is peer pressure that makes them turn it down. We might as well have served up human flesh. The wild rice, with its dark black and brown earth colors, is passed in its bowl like a hot soccer ball. Pumpkin pie made from the very same squash used for “their” tortelli is left in whole slabs. Some of the kinder ones take an infinitesimal nick. The kids return home, untainted and unchanged, undoubtedly hungry, still loyal members of Mother’s tribe. Clare is not devastated. She is defensive and rationalizes it. Introducing change as an outsider seems nearly impossible. The micca is very, very solid.

  I’m still stuck, jostling at the bread counter. This morning a crowd formed even though it was early. A thin man with a worn clay-colored hat orders twelve micche. Two workers are next and they take more than a pound of focaccia and ask that it be made into hearty mortadella sandwiches. A woman with a straw basket orders two long Tuscan loaves—three and three-quarter pounds—and four whole-wheat micche. The next woman takes three micche. The one following her complains, “Yesterday, the dough was too moist. Not well baked. Be more careful with me.”

  Seldom is buying bread an instant acquisition. One of this, two of those, each type is weighed separately and fixed with its price. The elevation of repetition in existence, almost the opposite of my focus, can be felt in the seriousness of this Parma shopping.

  Italian Fascism used bound sheaves of grain, a Roman image, as a symbol. Pictures of the shirtless Duce whacking at wheat were used to emphasize grain’s meaning. His campaign to make Italy self-sufficient in wheat was disastrous and meant that fruit and vegetable raising went by the boards. But wheat to the Fascists meant ancient glory, present greatness, motherland, and people forcibly bunched together by a single common definition. Eventually the terrible monolithic simplification and its violence became tragically obvious. By then it was too late.

  The bread bins in the local store I patronize receive the fresh bread in early waves carried on the shoulders of several men. Brought to the back in large containers that are hoisted, the hundreds of micche, like fat rocks that won’t roll, are poured into a chute. Yesterday, the man standing next to me shouted out, “Berlusconi is a thief.” “We’re all thieves,” an older clerk who dyes his hair retorted, laughing, from behind six whole prosciuttos, each shaped like a lute. “You may be and Berlusconi is,” the man said, “but I certainly am not.” A gray-headed woman with a grandchild in tow nodded cynically. “Eh, beh,” she said, cutting him down to size, “let’s not lose our heads.”

  Bread stores aren’t the only establishments that have been updated in Parma. Most missed by me are the apothecaries where mortar and pestle were seen even five years ago. After fifty or sixty years, a pink marble counter was permeated by use. It had a slightly oiled, concave ripple where hands exchanged goods and money day in and day out.

  Along the main streets in the center, shops continually go in and out of business. In a matter of days, they are gutted, the “look” reduced to brick and plaster shells. They seem bombed, as they are temporarily boarded up and reworked. Revisionists wiping out the recent past are apparently erasing tax problems too. All up and down the main streets there is frantic, defiant new money. Micche, too, are being offered in yuppie versions, small as a kiwi, for those slimming or eating on the run. Time is moving faster than it used to, and this pressure and stress is often called capitalism or consumismo here.

  The collection of people jammed at the bread counter with me still approximates a heterogeneous village. Yesterday, a woman explains, her father was helicoptered down from the mountains by the public health service. She didn’t like the way they loaded him on the carrier even though the emergency service functioned. Here, perhaps because home is so tightly maintained, so constructed as a fortress inside a half-mistrusted world, illness is given all due respect as the only force powerful enough to invade and alter home life. Death undoes what would otherwise be perfect schemes for control, continuity, and great responsibility to a family’s members.

  In extended families,
it’s common for at least one woman to stay home to do the work of the house. As long as a mother lives, she occupies the highest rung in the hierarchy, where she has a strong voice, often critical and complaining. The work done in the house is great enough to be quite nuanced. There is apprenticeship and the standards are high. Homemaking is labor-intensive. It is sophisticated. Inflexibility can be the way this heavy role’s power is misused. Power is often a sharp, direct verbal command. Resentment is expressed and people can be nagged and forced. But the space of home life, in spite of its prisons and traps, is more than honorable and more than the sum of its squabbles and suffering. Its refuge is the base for an identity. The Latin family favors a traditional female definition of world and nurture: keeping children and networks of family and memory physically close. It forms bonds tighter than links to the outside world.

  The order of the day, like an old agricultural rhythm, is set by meals. An amazing woman in the building next door told me that for the sixty years of her marriage she had always set the table precisely at twelve-thirty. “If I didn’t do it,” she said, perceiving its strange compelling truth, “I wouldn’t know who I was.” In possession of every domestic skill from making nocino liquor by plucking walnuts on midsummer night’s eve when the dew fell, to crocheting eye-blinding patterns in curtains, to having a book in hand before going to sleep (“My father only let me finish fifth grade and after that he beat me if he found me reading”), she was the leader of a family of three daughters. Around this often delicious and competitive order of excellence each member, in his or her anarchic or peaceful state, joins with the others. Micche are broken by pressing with both thumbs.

  Clare, who is trying to transcribe some of Alba’s recipes to make books for Pietro’s family and for Angela, finds none for bread. Alba, whose skills enabled her to do the most complicated dishes, was frightened by bread’s mythical difficulty. In her mind, you needed a man to knead it and a public oven for the proper heat. Clare is surprised by all the notes in the margins of the cookbooks. Alba’s large penned open a’s and o’s bring a whole person back into view. Near a sweet made of sugar and butter and chocolate and eggs, one of Clare’s favorites, Alba wrote, “Help me to remember, Lord, that this is service in Thy name.” There are many desperate cries for help to go on. These stab and worry and bring back the intensity of Alba’s life. Nearly every week in her retirement Alba would rise at dawn and work near her wood-burning stove rolling out paper-thin pasta, simultaneously making two or three fillings, a roast and cutlets, vegetable dishes with layers of mushrooms and crepes, desserts with almonds and chocolate or lemon fillings, all to be readied and sent down to her children in separate bags coded with different-colored ribbons. The food, elaborate and often overly rich, had to be frozen and staggered, one gourmet dish at a time. Unless we were in a certain mood. Then nearly all of it would be devoured in one fantastically pleasurable sitting, and then for days afterward, like lions, we would lie low in our satiated states.