Perfection stood out in Alba’s work. The food came down, like the knitted sweaters with even stitches like kernels of corn, in lieu of herself. When a sleeve came out too long, she would take it back and do it over. The gifts of work came down from the mountain, generously, imaginatively, and in some sense unable to ask in person to be remembered as someone who loved. They were complex gifts, full of pride, exploration of new trends. I often felt, too, that they were full of sorrow. As is true for most people here, that would have been too difficult to admit in words.
Elio Vittorini, an anti-Fascist writer, presents one of the most powerful descriptions of a mother as a whole person that I have ever read. Food and bread figure in the story. The mother is defined, not by her motherhood, but by her deep knowledge of life in its pleasure and pain and suffering. For this she exists inside history in its material sense. She is by no means invisible or unconsidered. A woman who has learned to give injections to support herself after her husband and children leave her, she is an active, wise, and deep survivor.
In Magna Graecia, where Greeks colonized what would become Sicily, long before the elevation of Mary in the Holy Roman Church, many myths of women, including their fertility and dark offerings, existed. Vittorini’s novel, published in 1941, is called Conversazione in Sicilia. In the novel, the protagonist leaves his wife and returns for a brief visit to his mother, where he is renewed. (Freud is overruled by a more basic sense of origin as a conscious and physiological tie.) In the stunning light of Sicily and its mountains so heedless of prayer, his mother prepares him food. Variety is limited by poverty. The food’s richness comes from the fact that it has been fixed and shared. Unaware of her son’s pending arrival, the mother has prepared herring for herself. It is the same kind of fish that the family always ate together. She shares it with her son. During the meal, he remembers grasses and herbs that were sprinkled on to vary its taste. Memories of the family, like the bones in the fish, come out of these wordless attempts at giving and survival.
As the novel develops, the protagonist asks his mother if she ever betrayed his father, who often betrayed her. She admits that she did. The protagonist’s mother was baking bread when the starving peddler who became her lover knocked. She put salt, oregano, and oil on hot thick slices of bread before serving it to the deeply exhausted man. He gave thanks to God. But she understood that in his hunger and thirst he hoped that God would give him more. She makes love to him out of a sense of her own need. He becomes her lover for a while.
The protagonist’s mother is far more in touch than his father—who wants a woman to be someone with soft hands and an educated voice. His mother reaches out to life’s premises of real feeling: loneliness and sharing, suffering, enjoyment. She becomes a protagonist in everyday terms. In bread, this breaking and opening up, repetition is not an unconscious thing. Its shape, the offering in it, is deliberate and wished for. There is order in poverty, and tradition keeps poverty dignified. Housecleaning, too, even including its oppressive paranoia, still gives poverty an acceptable face or order in a bare home. Food, well prepared, gives pleasure and entertainment. The woman dominates the material world, accepts its limits, and through this, nourishes herself as an individual. It would be interesting to know how many women can identify with or accept this picture as an important one. It is only in part a standard pattern in Parma.
At last it’s my turn at the bread counter. Often I feel a morning’s mood ruined in the fifteen or twenty minutes I am buffeted, waiting and walking up and down crowded aisles, as I pick up food for lunch. Two little girls push to the front and pop up like tennis balls. Rudely and unexpectedly, they snatch my place, as they shout out their mother’s order. Children, well dressed, firmly in hand, on buses, too, are usually given precedence over adults for the few large green plastic seats. The thirty-year-old clerk smiles at me as if I am too severe. Recently he has removed an earring from his ear. His wife didn’t mind, but his father couldn’t bear it. I sigh and ask for Tuscan bread. The Tuscan loaf, too, a floury interloper with a free-market price, is fighting for survival.
And they heated the oven used to bake bread and threw [the manuscript] into the flames. But after some years, by a special commission from God, she composed another one
[28]
PLACE
Today is another day. The eighty-six-year-old man standing to the left of me at the counter is legally blind. I sometimes walk him home. I feel the pressure of life. I want to rush back to my work. I could cut off the almost ancestral gesture that makes me turn. I turn. My listening ear bends in his direction.
Signor A. has a strong sense of place. He counts his steps from the door of his apartment to the street, to the greengrocer shop, to the bar where he gets his morning coffee, to the back of the store where bread is distributed. Starting from the springing snap of the wooden elevator doors outside his apartment, he takes 469 steps. I wait. His lips open toward my face, orienting himself by sound. My accent is strong and my height such that he can feel that he is in my shadow. He often tries out his English, phrases like “very, very good” or “President Clinton.” His grocery list is written by a woman who is paid to assist him. He hands it into the air. His order: one micca for lunch, one for dinner.
The numbers of his conscious single-minded steps often come to my mind. Like a Bach cantata, beats lift from repetition into pattern into an individual part. His life’s dignity is order, a correctness with its own relative measures. He loves to talk, as most people do here. I admire not only his bravery, his patient wisdom, but also the sincerity of the poetry he has written and recites in secret to me. Signor A. inches along the tree-lined boulevards permeated by the sickly sweet smell of lindens, past the sixteenth-century walled fortifications of the Farnese dukes, and often climbs onto a bus unassisted. He moves with snail-like precision on relatively geometric streets that he knows perfectly.
From Dante onward, Italian cities imprint a life with streets to be worked into the blood of a language and dialect. A writer who expected exile, Dante said that the bread of others always had too much salt. But besides what Dante said about bread, I am struck by how he was working on language—finding a language that could be called Italian. Manzoni, too, was working on language, and laying out new ground for its usages and its authority. It was a political and artistic task. It involved building from dialects a language for the people that could carry art forward beyond Latin, and a country toward a common history. We seem to be at one of those crossroads; women and many groups will take language forward from what has been written into different perspectives and stories. Technology, too, is running language out faster than its realities can be reintegrated. In nonfiction, at least, women won’t be writing about what’s already been said. That is probably what interests me even in exploring bread. We need stories taken from life and worked into new tales that are grounded in humanness, that take the old and knead its powers.
Virginia Woolf called the activity of writing, which she never separated from an economic independence, “more than a maternal tie.” I don’t find that phrase a definition, but I find it fascinating that she would define the activity of connecting the self with an outside reality—the recording of existence—by breaking the connection that for her was so deep and incisive.
I like the idea of the micca as a thing in a real place, as well as a substance with historical and linguistic vibrations and exchanges. It is important to understand that Parma is not Reggio Emilia or Modena, even though they are tiny distances apart. Cities have very distinct traditions and realities. Radio statistics a few days ago said there were two suicides in Parma last year; in Reggio Emilia, there were fifty. My sister, in the same vein of radio statistics, told me that women who drink more than five cups of coffee a day are less likely to commit suicide than women who don’t. Maybe women in Parma drink more coffee. Statistics, as Clare is finding, are often questions of framing. The incomes of the two cities are more or less the same, but Reggio Emilia was or is an a
nticlerical, left-leaning city, with perhaps more secular and open eyes. Parma is more conservative, has more Catholics, a feeling for elegance, and probably a different attitude toward violence. It was a European court. Bread in Parma will have shadings that are different. Attention to food is part of Italy’s way of life, but the micca in Parma has nearly a maternal tie: perhaps bread in Parma is the maternal tie.
Like Signor A., I think that I could walk blindfolded through a part of my past. I could still trot the mile and a half from my grade school to my childhood house. Maybe I could even run it, my pockets full of chestnuts in the fall, my feet flying to escape snowballs in winter. My childhood holds together as a single, physical safe place. But after that, no path, no specific American street, remains in my blood as home. Even before the shattering death of my father, the basics of sharing, the extravagant and dramatic sense of play, of loss and gain, mistakes and forgiveness, were missing. As was any sense of a woman as a queen or a patron, a source of dancing, makeup, theater, problem solving, a priestess, or a normal human font of emotion. The females were like the drab birds who could hardly be seen as they sat on their nests. The woman didn’t boogie-woogie or tell you what made a good lover. She didn’t make many stories real when we were growing up—those stories that heal and those that can redeem. Yet it was my mother’s stories that in some way shaped us to look for romantic love and goodness and for faith.
I have lived for long periods in three countries. I probably always wanted to see beyond any form of edge. Like most voyagers, once I was first off, for some time I was probably trying to find my way back: perhaps with the hope of telling my brothers and sister new stories, stories that would set their lives alight or bring us back in more playful arrangements inside the tight childhood bonds of responsibility and love, with so few other social influences added in that we were nearly tragically fated to find distances one from the other.
Italy, when I first saw it at age twenty-two, was all color and beauty, all about the senses and ideas. I was already married. Italy was flexible from the outside, tolerant, crackling with politics that referred to changing the social order. Its churches, too, were filled with a power that was far greater than a patina. I loved its bread, its wine, its ways of forgiveness and bending rules. Intellectuals and artists were part of the social fabric, and that way of life seemed under no pressure like success or making money. One could live and find space for self-expression.
I was bored as a child. I was always speaking up. From childhood into my teens, I was sent from the table so often that the carpet behind my chair had a worn swath leading toward the stairs. I loved toads, lizards, birds with broken wings. I was looking for life. You could often find me at the neighbors’, holding forth with Josephine, a maid, a languid patient woman who called me “honey chile” and wore slippers with no backs. How I suffered and disobeyed when my father told me I was not to touch her black skin. I suffered when my father crossed my first painting out—with bold dark pencil slashes that made my tree disappear. I suffered when he rewrote speeches that I composed as a teenager, leaving his version by my bed to find when I woke up. I began to howl quite early on. I couldn’t bear the church we went to. I spit out my first communion wine. I probably always possessed a ringingly clear sense of myself, and it didn’t work too easily into my parents’ ideas, so formal and unsearching. As I became aware of it, I found being part of the white Protestant establishment a strange conflict, not knowing how to proceed inside it as a woman. I could see no roles or identity that really fit me.
My grandfather’s large white wooden house in Chippewa Falls, built by his Norwegian parents, has back stairs and front stairs. There were women to keep it polished and dusted. The word in the plural gave me an unpleasant contradictory sensation of guilt and happy superiority, as we twirled on the ironwork fences hemming the yard. But I was not very happy. I set up a fierce hunger strike that didn’t make life easy for my parents when I was young. I was hospitalized with malnutrition, rickets. The strict borders that my parents had—no night lights, clean plates, no being held after bad dreams—added to the crushing ideas they insisted on for girls, contributed to deep doubts and splits about life at home. Where was it? How could it be, if a family meant love, that time was spent telling so many stories about how girls’ intelligence would be a liability, a burden, something that could destroy my chances for a normal life? Intelligence was played off against love and obedience. Rebellion, too, was presented as a sure recipe for remaining outside. Certain common stories they believed revealed a conservative unconsciousness that I couldn’t put to rest.
At my mother’s father’s house (by then he lived in Washington, D.C., and my uncle’s family occupied it), I remember the plum tree in the backyard, and a tart taste from the fruits’ golden center that prepared me for my first kiss. Yet none of the childhood houses strikes me as containing a history that, like bread, would always reappear and be shared. The fictions built lives, but they were not allowed to become particularly exciting or human. Father’s study, two walls of books, was off-limits to us. For the kids, with our sloppy habits and possibly greasy fingers, Mom bought the World Book Encyclopedias and the Great Books from a door-to-door salesman. Father removed from our purview much of the modern world—the volumes on Freud, Darwin, and Marx and religions of the world. All Italian painting suddenly became naked bodies for the eyes of children. Up the large books flew to the shelves nearest the ceiling.
There was a reigning order. As my parents presented it, it was a very simple story. We were taught to believe in literal integrity, as if we were perfect inhuman Lutherans. We were also schooled and reschooled in the importance of honest intention. Unfortunately we assumed we could do this for others, and probably we became as deadly and prying as those green X-ray machines that were once used to peer inside shoes to see if the toes had room. That interest in intention, in belief, later on was re-scaled. While I cannot presume to know what lies inside of anyone’s soul, that realm still resonates for me. We were also given space. As is true for most children, it saved our lives.
Our childhood backyards were hives of daydreaming and fantasy with nearly no practical lessons about how to get on. We were given a sense of large boundaries. From there, with that great, living unrealistic sense, we each left the nest, in unexamined takeoffs, made more traumatic by our father’s death. After Father’s death, money was no longer a resource to help us make our ways. The houses I remember, in fact, probably represent to me women’s lives, not my father’s or grandfathers’ in spite of their domineering roles in these places. In their “out-of-the-worldness” and images of boring, unimportant work, the houses unconditionally belonged to my grandmothers and mother, who ran them.
There are almost no rich, collective oral cores, scents coming from gardens and ovens, not even sensations from the backs of drawers. Mother, secreted out of Father’s range, would liven up, sing, play the piano, teach us games. In the car, the station wagons that were clearly the closest thing Mother ever had to a room of her own—with the dog and the four of us in tow—we would all sing as she found a harmonizing chord. The self that perked up, opinionated and decisive, when Father was not around is another fable that worked into the story of women and bread.
Mother used to ask to see an 8 mm film of her wedding, as if to remember a more glorious space. We would beg Dad to run the home movies, and when we saw Mother, young, excited, and nervy, we all eagerly applauded. She loved, but so did we, the myth of that film. The magic veil lifts and her train spreads like a peacock’s tail down the steps. Her infinite, romantic hopes nervously radiate her beautiful, hungry face. Her own family is all around her, getting in and out of big cars. Cigars send up trails of dark, murky smoke. A silent film, an unmotherly movie star image of herself, was something we kids watched with a trapped feeling of Orpheus-like inadequacy. My parents in love, and on her lips a glowing narrow glamorous language that she wished for and never spoke as a woman who grew up. When my father died, all th
e children’s stories of suffering and love she had read us were of scarce help to her. She wanted first to hide and hide from any idea of pain. She didn’t know much about bread. And bread as economics became a source of fear. It represented social class and, without money, since women shouldn’t work, one, in some eighteenth-century way, could supposedly slip from a position of social privilege.
In some senses that sound preposterous—because they are just undefined words—love, nature, and eternity are my touchstones of where to look for place. More specifically, in front of my eyes, I would claim water, Lake Michigan, Lake Wissota, the Pacific, the Atlantic, but then those latter bodies of water are too large. I need the feeling of circumference. The artificial lake in northern Wisconsin where I spent childhood summers in its ice-cold iron-brown waters is perhaps the actual place most binding for me. My grandfather’s cottage, the last on a peninsula, so that water flashes its light from three sides of the land. There, even as an adult, I feel at one with my own inner speech. There, my mother, in her girlish old age, often stays alone, puttering, looking for her youth, and finding faith in the surrounding quiet. I have looked up, through the blowing pines, startled to see her saddling the roof and pouring hot, sticky black tar on patches that leak. At last, she’s broken free. Then it changes to an educated pose. She gets herself in check and sends a cheerful wave down to me. Oh, Mother, how I wish I could catch you; how beautiful it might have been to feel there were protective arms. But Mother, taking care of herself, has no intention of falling or being rescued by one of the children. On the roof, she’s a young girl, and she likes it a lot; even though there is no one she cares more for than her four children.
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